


of the essence

by separately (everbrighter)



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Chronic Illness, Eventual Happy Ending, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Getting Together, Identity Porn, Lio Fotia Is Always Cold, M/M, Multiverse, Tenderness, Time Travel, movie villain kray foresight
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-14 07:07:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28541523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everbrighter/pseuds/separately
Summary: Dr Lio Fotia, Twitter-famous scientist, is about to make a breakthrough on his potentially world-saving project when time decides to... stop... working. Meanwhile, the beautiful barista at the campus café downstairs keeps flirting with him. Which. Would be awesome. If it weren't for the aforementioned time... situation.[aka this is really hard to describe pls just trust me]
Relationships: Lio Fotia/Galo Thymos
Comments: 66
Kudos: 44





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Who is the audience for this? Me. I am the specific audience for this. 
> 
> This one is best viewed with creator styles on!
> 
> Notes to help with expectations:  
> \- I took some Creative Liberties in (re)interpreting the nature of the Promare  
> \- The coffee shop AU aspect is secondary to the sci-fi  
> \- The science aspect of the sci-fi here is very, hm, Movie Science  
> \- This work deals with a fictional illness to which there is an in-universe cure (which Lio is working on), but which manifests as a chronic condition. My plan is to deal with this as sensitively as possible but it's something to know about  
> \- This is a fusion, but telling u which fusion might spoil it??? idk if people care about that  
> \- I will update every few days! The fic is 100% written, I'm just editing right now.
> 
> Anyway I just love this ridiculous movie TYTYTY

Lio Fotia  
@dr_fotia   
Today’s the day. Third test of Promepolis’s own dimensional tunneler is happening today!! For all my fellow rifties out there, this one’s for you. (Who am I kidding? They’re all for you.) 6:47 AM - 14 December 2020  232  346 

Wake up. Send tweet to 362.5k followers. That part’s manageable.

But forget early Monday mornings, forget waking up alone for the millionth time, forget the freezing sensation under your heart that says something's coming, forget having to throw on your last clean shirt (“MOTHER OF DRAGONS”, 2015 vintage, regrettable), forget the rush out of the apartment when you’d rather be recovering from your last episode. Forget the brutality of skipping breakfast so you can catch a bus on the other side of a slushy snowbank from your leaking winter boots. Forget the way you give two-hour slices of every day away to a boss who barely knows what you do or what you love, just so you can get to your geographic destination. Forget the lineup at the coffee shop.

The worst thing about an early Monday morning is putting the armour back on that you stripped off on Friday night, then forcing yourself to pretend to be functional.

No, wait, thinks Lio Fotia, stuck behind a _third_ customer ordering loudly for a group without knowing what they are getting. The worst thing is the lineup. The second worst thing is the armour. He can’t take the lineup. The lineup is shit. The lineup is a hellish dilation of his limited time on earth, stretching between him, coffee, and the hopefully-first successful test of the dimensional tunneler he and his team have built in the basement of the Foresight Science Complex.

And not only that—it’s not just the lineup, it’s the environment, today at least. The screens that normally show the tastefully designed gold-on-black menus are an inexplicable, eye-searing disaster of day-glo colour today. He can’t even look at them. Animated migraine-scapes of hot pink on neon orange fill every single screen, flashing with the words _TO THE RESCUE!_ in childish, chartreuse hand-lettering. There might even be a soundtrack issuing from the displays, in direct and haunting contrast to the Rescue’s usual morning mix. Lio can’t even fucking look _up_ in this place or he’ll find his eyes assaulted into a sensory paste.

He has to look away from it. What he finds instead is a guy in front of him talking into his cell, saying revolting things about the date he had on the weekend. Behind him, there’s a woman absolutely refusing to do anything other than snuffle wetly and loudly every four point five seconds. And on the other side of the counter, there’s his fucking Monday morning nemesis. The barista to end all baristas! Future winner of the International Coffee Arts Championship! The Coffiest Of All Time, the COAT himself, Galo Thymos!

Yes! We get it! Shut the fuck up!

Lio puts his face in his hand and thinks about not having a headache in an attempt to not contract one. Instead he winds up looking at the pooling snow-wet squidging through the mat on the floor as he presses the weight of his boots into it. Is everything in the world so desperate to be hated? Can he not simply obtain a caffeine dose, exchange money for it, and leave?

Must he come face-to-face with the person he wants least to be targeted by right now? The cocky, beaming, beautiful man behind the counter, yelling at him: “What can I getcha, Doc?”, as though he doesn’t perfectly well know the answer? “Sorry about the menus, Lucia unleashed something into the system this morning.”

“It’s viral marketing,” says Lucia, from—behind the counter? Lio has to crane his neck. She’s crouched on the floor, her hair in two buns on top of her head, and she’s tapping at a laptop, maybe, though it’s hard to see. “Tryna impress our investor when he comes in on Friday by making it a _literal marketing virus._ Meanwhile these amateurs are like ‘oh no my menus’.” The toothy grin she turns up at Lio is frankly alarming. “They wouldn’t know genius if it hit ‘em in the face.”

“I think it’s cool!” Galo yells, only a little louder than his default volume. “Kray’s gonna love it, I just know it! He’s so smart and loves our business. He’s guaranteed to be down.”

“It’s taken over all the stuff on our wi-fi, including the register, and somehow it’s starting to affect the doctor’s office next door, so like, strongly advise airplane mode,” says Aina, who’s having to take orders in cash—probably some of the source of the delay and extra-long lineup.

Lucia hops up onto the countertop with a handful of clattering pink-and-gold USB lanyards in her fist, yelling, “If anybody wants to help us spread the word about the Rescue, let me know! Free swag if you do!!”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, nobody takes her up on her offer. Lio looks between the small woman’s knees at Galo, just short of gritting his teeth until they break.

“Galo Thymos,” Lio hisses, unwilling to put up with a picogram more of nonsense today, of all days. “I will take one soy latte, triple, extra hot. If not, bad things will happen.”

Galo issues a low whistle as Lucia launches herself at the gently intimidated customers in line. “Bad mood, huh, Doc? How about this—can I interest you in a chestnut custard latte, one of our winter specials? ‘Cause it sounds like you need to sweeten up!” The man is apparently incapable of talking more quietly than a low and controlled yell. Let it end.

“No,” says Lio, curtly. “Thank you.”

“Oookaaayyy,” says Galo, bracing himself against the edge of the counter. He’s wearing a black tee a size too small for him. It does a terrible job of containing the muscles of his neck, shoulders, and chest, and on the breast pocket there’s a shield emblazoned with the shop’s name. His apron has the Rescue Roastery’s logo on it, too, as though there’s no amount of workplace pride that can possibly satisfy him. His socks are probably Rescue-branded, too. 

“I’ve also been working on an orange mocha,” Galo says, leaning forward even more, grinning at Lio like he’s some kind of challenge. “Tastes like a chocolate orange, but has an espresso base, so you’ll be properly caffeinated and everything. How ‘bout it?”

“It’s really good,” says Lucia, from the back of the line, where she’s foisting two lanyards on a beleaguered librarian.

“ _No._ ”

“Okay, okay—” Galo reaches around him for a doppio-sized cup, leans back over the counter again. _Right_ over it, so that he’s in Lio’s face. “Bet this one’s gonna be a hit. The amaretti cookie latte. Has that signature sweet almond taste, but I make it in a high-fat milk so you get a butteriness alongside. When I serve it in a mug I wanna crust part of the rim with slivered almonds. Whaddya say.”

Lio snaps. Enough. Fucking _enough_.

He leans over the countertop, grabs Galo by the front of his shirt, drags him down. There’s a sick, twisted little part of him that wants to yank Galo’s hair and push him down so his cheek is flat on the counter. Instead Lio just leans forward, holding Galo’s wide-eyed gaze, and hisses: “I am not interested, and never will be interested, in any of your revolting seasonal abominations. Today is not the day to test me. There’s a taser in my bag, so help me.”

“Yowza,” says Lucia, coming back to behind the counter. “ _Ice cold_.”

Galo lets the hold happen. Searches Lio's face. Doesn't look scared, just—blinks fast, looks wounded for a dangerous second, inhales deep, and goes very, very neutral.

“You better let me go," he says, slowly, as quiet as Lio's ever heard him. "Let’s not turn this into something. Like, I get it. It’s a bad day. But you don’t wanna be this guy.”

Lio lets him go, looks at his hand like it’s burning, shakes it off, shakes _himself_ off, straightens up. “Sorry,” he mutters. “I just want in and out.”

“In and out, right,” Galo says neutrally, and backs up to his station to prep—well, it’s got to be Lio’s usual, his soy latte, triple, extra hot, because he didn’t even have to ask, because what else has Lio gotten every single day he’s come in since the Rescue opened on the lower level of the Science Complex a year ago?

Galo doesn’t look at him when he sets the to-go cup down in front of him. Aina, behind the cash, flares her nostrils at Lio and speaks to him _extra_ coolly. “Good thing for you he has a crush on you the size of the Pacific Ocean,” she says. “I’ve _seen_ him with other harsh customers. You got off easy. He was too sweet to you.” She slides his breakfast sandwich across the counter. “I won’t be so sweet the next time you talk to _any_ of our staff that way.”

Lio drops his gaze. Nods. Keeps his roiling annoyance deep in his belly when he walks out the Rescue’s door, tries not to let it spin up into even more of a bad mood, tries not to hope _too_ much around the mention of that oceanic crush. He ruined it, anyhow.

***

“ _What_ ,” he spits at Meis, when, in the observation room, the theoretician surprises him with what was probably meant to be a soothing hand on his shoulder.

“You need to calm down,” says Meis. “You’re upsetting the grad students. Eko said he had to hide in the bathroom when you walked past. As we speak Roula’s scheming pranks to spring on you as revenge. And—looks like she’s not the only enemy you’re making.” He points to the take-out cup with its sharpie scrawl. Instead of the _Dr Fotia :)_ it usually bears, the scrawl says _DR DUMBASS_. No emoticon.

Lio sighs hard out his nose, perches his forehead on his splayed fingers, tries to ignore the shard of cold sticking under his heart. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles. “Big ep coming on. Big day. Don’t want to get sick in the middle of the test like last time.” Last time, he’d passed out right as the tunneler had teleported the subject, a crate of beans. He’d missed the resulting turning inside-out of every single bean in the crate. And of the crate itself. A minor explosion, but one he’d been blacked out during, with a stomach upset as a chaser.

Meis’s hand comes to his shoulder, less suddenly this time. More of a friendly caress. “We’re gonna get it, boss. We’re close. We’ll square this one away no problem. Friday’ll be a cinch.”

“I just don’t want to look Kray in the eye again and tell him we need more time. _Again_. I don’t want to have that conversation.” And he doesn’t want to have to tell his social media followers, most of whom see him and the project as a beacon of hope for people with rift syndrome.

“I don’t want to lose this project,” he murmurs into his latte.

“I get it, boss,” Meis says, and sits beside him. “But even if we do, we can still be proud of what we’ve made, can’t we?” He lifts his chin at the window. At what’s past it.

A concrete box with a tube running through it, the room beyond is aggressively lit. Here in the observation room, they’re high above the accelerator tube and their particular apparatus, the tunneler, which sits on a concrete platform below. If Lio presses his face to the window, he’ll see Gueira, tiny next to the tube, working with one of the electricians on the last safety check.

He’ll see the tunneler. The teleporter. The thing that will get them across the rift so they can say _please stop you’re killing us_.

The door to the observation room opens. Eko and Roula, bearing heavy-loaded clipboards and wearing parkas, poke their heads in. When Lio meets their eyes they both make a visible effort not to shrink back.

“Big ep coming,” Meis explains on his behalf, when Lio opens his mouth and fails to make words happen. “Still waiting for that caffeine to kick in.”

And because they’re angels, Eko and Roula nod their respective heads. “Totally understandable,” Eko says, and hands the checklist to Lio. The clipboard’s shaking. Like the rest of them are— _should_ be, Lio thinks, of his own irritability—Eko is out-of-his-mind excited. “Everything’s basically in order, it looks like.”

“Thank you,” Lio manages, and flips through to do his own check. His thumb skims Eko and Roula’s margin notes, lands on a blank spot. “Says here you wanted to re-check the internal temperature sensor?”

“Oh, yeah, oops,” says Roula. “It was registering a little hot. We were gonna give the coolant some time to circulate properly before checking it again.” She takes the clipboard from Lio, moves to the door. “I’ll head back down.”

“Coming with you,” says Eko, scrambling back out of the door after Roula, most likely as a way to retreat from the close quarters of the observation room, which—fair. There’s only really room for five in here, comfortably spaced.

Lio watches them go, sighs out his nose. “They’re really good.” Thumbs at the edge of his DR DUMBASS cup, stings. “I hope for their sake that this one works.” Because like him, like Gueira, like Meis, most of their grad students have rift syndrome, too, and this project could put an end to it.

“Tweet it, boss,” Gueira says, and drops into the chair beside Meis. “Your followers’ll eat up that sentimental crap.” (This earns him a nudge in the ribs from Meis’s elbow, and a soft “ _ssht_ ”.)

He concedes, in part.

Lio Fotia  
@dr_fotia   
[thread] Updates on today’s progress to come under this tweet. Here’s our current vantage point from the tunneler’s observation deck on the Foresight Collider. For anyone who’s new here, the Collider is 233 kilometres long, tracing nearly the entire perimeter of the Republic. 9:32 AM - 14 December 2020  1.5k  3.1k 

He posts. While Gueira handles Roula and Eko’s questions about coolant and temperature control over the intercom, Meis listening on with what can only be described as fondness, Lio watches the stats on the post tick up at speed. Sure today’s just a test, but still Lio’s gratified to see people responding to his content with excitement.

Well. And also frequent skepticism about whether the dimensional rift in which the planet is currently embedded is actually likely to swallow the Earth entire within the next decade, the next year, the next six months. And about whether rift syndrome is real or not.

(He blocks those people. With impunity.)

a small arctic bird  
@ptarmigan   
@dr_fotia Pls give us more information about how u will ensure that opening a black hole on our planet will not accelerate the rift, the people need to know... 9:35 AM - 14 December 2020  22  34 

NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING  
@matoimochi   
@dr_fotia good luck today !!!!! I believe in u!! 9:37 AM - 14 December 2020  1 

Yes I do have a math equation named after me  
@wind_blade_   
@dr_fotia doing ur job for u boss… everybody on this tweet pls read our cool coauth’d paper about what we’re working on: arxiv.org/abs/2012... 9:40 AM - 14 December 2020  62 133 

It’s a whole different ballgame from handling an account that nobody sees. Like this, he’s known. There are interview requests waiting for confirmation in his DMs, in his work email, in the separate email he keeps for speaking inquiries. The attention has a gravitational pull of its own—demanding his focus, but also making the world heavier on him.

But more than the modelling and theory stuff, which is Meis’s wheelhouse, or the programming and machinery stuff, which is Gueira’s, this leadership stuff is Lio’s strength.

So he doesn’t mind dispensing the “sentimental crap”, as Gueira calls it. It’s a way to carry a message to other rifties that there’s change coming. To let them know that that change is within their grasp.

***

Roula and Eko come back up to the observation room with their checklist completed and eye Lio, heads together, still obviously a little put out by his earlier behaviour. He’s too involved in what’s happening to care much, though. Adrenaline’s blazing through him, although that could be the ep coming, too. Often his eps feel like nausea and bone-deep chills, both common symptoms. But sometimes they feel bizarrely ecstatic just before they happen, too, like he’s charging headfirst into something, like he’s screaming into a wind tunnel. Like that brief moment during deep drunkenness where you feel high from head to toe before feeling worse than ever.

“Everything checks out, boss,” says Meis, a little breathless, like he’s staring over a cliff at an endless vista. “All systems go.”

“Gonna head down there,” he tells the room. “I need to see it up close, get a good photo. The recorders are all on, and you don’t need me babysitting you right now.”

“Good thing Kray loves your social media presence, otherwise I’d say sit your ass down. But go ahead, knock yourself out.” Meis’s got his head down; same with Gueira. They’re too busy doing their own babysitting. And fair enough. For all of them, this is a decade’s work come to a third peak none of them want to fall off of. 

He heads into the hallway, presses the button to the second elevator, the one that only connects the accelerator levels, finds it waiting for him, heads to the bottom. In the yawning, brightly-lit concrete space, red railings streak the room horizontally. The room hums to its own music as a hundred different pieces of apparatus do their work. Their station is just one room of many along the enormous perimeter of the accelerator, but arguably the one with the most practical application, namely: the teleporter, the tunneler, the thing he’s stepping up to now.

There’s the greater platform, which takes up most of the ground floor in the room and is studded with cabinets and consoles full of controls and instrumentation. In the middle is the teleporter itself: a futuristic, free-standing shower-looking thing. Circular footplate to step on. Circular emitter overhead.

When the system initiates, the footplate and emitter should connect. The doorway should open. And they should be able to cross over into the Cold Side. They’ve done it on a much smaller scale, sent streams of information and mini-probes through and had them come back. They’re nearly there. They just need to sustain a micro-white hole and a micro-black hole next to one another for long enough that a person-sized test subject can come back through from the other side.

Could be in a year they do that. Could be in a decade. But if their hypotheses bear out… could be today.

“Doc, phase 4 is good,” Meis says over the intercom, meaning the white and black holes have formed. His voice is a little blurry in the immensity of the room, but maybe it’s emotion getting in there, too. “The operational computer is—how do I put this diplomatically—wigging the fuck out? But, uh, still seems to be going?”

Lio thumbs a key on one of the consoles, push-to-talk. “Don’t shut it down yet. Keep it recording, I want all the data we can get,” he says, and grabs the side of the console, eyes fixed on the teleporter. “I just want a good look at it. A real good look.”

Nothing happens for a moment. Then there’s a sensation inside Lio’s body like someone’s taken hold of his liver and started dragging him by it. There’s a flash of light he closes his eyes just in time not to be temporarily blinded by.

When he blinks open, there it is.

A cylindrical column of pink-violet light vibrating on the platform. There’s an incredible shimmer of turquoise in its heart, like a colour-shifting jewel that’s a different colour depending on which eye you look at it with.

Later, he’ll think to himself: probably not the best idea to look directly at or touch something that’s wildly untested on human subjects! Like, pretty much anything would be safer! But that’s later. He’s worked on this for ten years. He knows it’s expressly not pointing at any coordinates in particular; they’re just testing whether it opens. And it’s _stable_.

So first he takes a photo. Drops the messenger bag from his shoulder, since it’s weighing down his shoulder, and takes several more, in case of shaky hands. Then he tucks his phone into his back pocket, approaches the beam like he’s an awkward teen asking someone to dance with him—looks up at the observation room to check that nobody’s got their eye on him right that second—

—and steps into the beam. Lifts his face toward the emitter overhead like he’s seeking sunlight. Could swear he feels it pulling at him, pulling him nowhere but here. Lets it.

Mistake.

There’s a staticky fizzling noise. A crack and slap to his kidney. He lurches forward, every muscle in his body clenching _hard_ , like he’s made of a thousand doors slamming suddenly shut, and blacks out. 

When he comes awake, breathing hard, his cheek’s on the floor. There’s a smell of burning plastic. 

Blurry voices, coming into focus: “—can’t believe he seriously—” “You _knew_ he would, husband mine. You _knew_ he would.” “Then why didn’t you stop him?” “I was—we were all busy—”

“Meis, Gueira, I swear on the rift I’m fine,” Lio says, and grunts his way to sitting. “Just a little ep. I’ll be fine.”

“That was no fucking episode,” Meis says, peeved, taking hold of his upper arm. “Don’t you dare fucking lie to me about that. This is go-to-the-hospital serious, Lio Fotia.”

Lio shakes him off. “It isn’t. The serious part is that we got it _working_. That there was a _stable tunnel_. It _worked_.”

“Well it ain’t working no more, boss,” Gueira says, jerking his head toward the observation room. “Computer’s all infected with some brutal fucking virus telling us to go drink coffee upstairs. And don’t tell me you don’t smell that burning. Something overloaded.”

“Then fix it,” Lio says, putting his face in his hands.

“ _Let us handle that part_ ,” Meis says, and with his husband’s help gets Lio to his feet and presses him into the elevator. Up they go. Then they pass a very confused Roula and Eko still in the observation room, and go up the second elevator to the department lounge, where—because he will not consent to anything more—they put Lio on the department’s dilapidated sofa and give him a blue gatorade from the ever-stocked stash in the department fridge.

“You are to stay here for at least an hour,” Meis instructs, while Gueira boils a kettle of water and squeezes a lemon into a jug. “If you experience _anything_ else you call me _immediately_ and I _will_ drive you to the hospital.”

Lio grunts into the office blanket Meis has given him from the back of his own desk chair. “Whatever, Mom.”

“Don’t be a cheeky shit, I’m worried about what I’ll have to tell Kray Fucking Foresight at our update meeting on Friday. ‘Sorry, I allowed our principal investigator to nearly kill himself on our potentially world-saving dimension-crossing machine. Which, by the way, is very broken. Please give us _another_ extension and several million more dollars.’ He’s going to literally murder me,” Meis concludes, throwing his back against the back of the sofa so that they both bounce.

Lio turns his cheek against the cushion, shuts his eyes. “No. What he’s going to do is make a big deal about us beating the Hestians again.”

Gueira pours out hot lemon water into three cups, stirs honey into each, a tidy assembly line of care, and hands them out. “If we can’t use our massive brains to put Kray on top in some fabricated quasi-nationalistic rivalry, what is even the point of science? Wait,” he says, stopping himself to look at Meis, then grab him by the arm and drag him up. “Why are we making him feel guilty for not resting? Let’s go feed the grad students. C’mon. Rest, boss. Seriously.”

They exit, arm in arm, leaving Lio alone with the swimming of his brain, with his slight nausea, with the cold shard still lodged under his breastbone foretelling eps to come, with the gatorade wedged between his hip and the back of the sofa, with the hot honey lemon held in his hand. The fluorescent panel-lights overhead aren’t particularly conducive to naptime. The grayness of the sky outside makes him think nature’s frowning at him. The hum of the fridge, of the whole Science Complex, is as loud to him right now as any screaming.

And so of course, he tweets.

Lio Fotia  
@dr_fotia   
We did it! We established a stable tunnel to the Cold Side. It was brief, and we’ll need to do some repairs on the machinery that failed afterwards, but this is a huge accomplishment for the whole team. Here’s a photo. Making history, here. 1:38 PM - 14 December 2020  3.3k  5.8k 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow! it has been! a week!
> 
> content notes for this ch are at the end since they contain spoilers 💜

He does not sleep on the sofa. He takes his married-friends-mandated break, sure, but he doesn’t sleep, even though he probably should. Instead he rips open a foil baggie of pre-burnt office coffee and dumps it into a filter and flicks the switch on the coffeemaker. It glows redly against the dark backsplash of the unlit lounge kitchenette, beacon of caffeination for any and all who need it.

The coffee brutalizes his tastebuds, but that works, because he then proceeds to stay up all fucking night trying to get the tunneler up and running again. He and Meis and Gueira—and Roula and Eko, too reliable for their own good, at least until he sends them home by threatening them with his cookery (“I will make you the most incredible casserole. Oh, will I _ever_ make it.”)—alternate between the observation room and the tunneler floor, just trying to figure out where the issues started, just trying to get a grip on how bad the damage is.

By morning Lio’s only remaining goal is to burn the project, this entire Science Complex, and Promepolis itself to the ground, and he drags himself up into his office for a few minutes’ peace. In the desk chair that still bears the buttprint of its previous owner, he caves his shoulders, brings his hands to his face, drops the backs of his hands onto his desk. Forces a deep breath out of the bottoms of his lungs and lets out a drained, broken noise. Prays gratitude to all the spirits that his office has a fucking door.

He shouldn’t’ve pulled an all-nighter. He shouldn’t’ve. It’s just inviting that creeping episode that still hasn’t hit yet. Not that there’s really any way of predicting an ep, but this is a matter of superstition: that the body has a memory, and a vengefulness; that if he overexerts himself there will be consequences. The echo of eps past, or maybe the memory of being electroshocked by his own apparatus, rattles around in his head like a ball bearing. A threat against his softer tissues.

So of course, feeling as he does, like utter shit, he sniffs, pulls his face up off the desk, and tabs over to Twitter.

Lio Fotia  
@dr_fotia   
We went all night, but no progress on getting the tunneler back up and running. In the meantime, someone (i.e., me) needs to caffeinate. Will keep you all posted.  9:06 AM - 15 December 2020  507  3.3k 

He takes a few selfies of his exhaustion—him under a blanket with his face nearly down on the desk, just as he’s been doing for the last fifteen minutes following the team’s morning stand-up meeting—and selects the cutest one to post alongside his tweet. 

Then a click as his office door opens, a knock on the doorframe, and the sound of footsteps on the laminate floor. “Hey, boss,” says Gueira, sounding about as rough as Lio feels but way more cheery about it. “Take. Off. For cryin’ out loud.”

“Very kindly fuck off yourself,” says Lio, sitting up, blinking his eyes wider open. “Both of you,” he says now to Meis, who—they are so infuriatingly _married_ —is close behind Gueira.

“Not till you go eat something. You’re very obviously hangry. What comes next after hangry?” Meis furrows his brow at Gueira. “Furmished?”

Gueira squints. “Is that some kind of furry thing?”

“I mean _furious_ portmanteaued with _famished_ , dumbass—”

“First of all, Dr Dumbass is _clearly_ sitting here in front of us, per yesterday. Second of all, it’s not my fault that typically the first syllable in _furious_ isn’t pronounced like _fu_ —”

The pounding in Lio’s head can’t handle their ridiculous exhaustion-addled banter a second longer, so he stands straight up. His chair jets out from under him when his thighs knock it back. He grabs his coat, yanks it onto his body, checks for his wallet and keys. Every movement is jagged-edged and oversized. Meis and Gueira fall silent in his doorway and part from their huddle when he walks into the hallway to lock his door.

“Still got that feeling like an ep coming. Brain buzz, cold flashes,” Gueira murmurs, trying no doubt to be gentle, but Lio’s not interested: his mind, a crucible of nastiness right now, transforms Gueira’s kindness into condescension. “Big one.”

“Me too,” says Meis, at Lio’s other shoulder as they walk. “Take the elevator, boss, just in case.”

Lio shrugs his coat up around his ears, stops in the vestibule, looks from Meis to Gueira, and sighs. “Sure.” He isn’t particularly looking forward to going down to the Rescue, knowing he’ll have to face what he did yesterday, but better to face it than let it stew. If there’s one thing Lio’s good at, it’s confronting things head on.

And he needs coffee. The edge he’d sharpened himself to using the burnt office stuff is all fuzzy now.

“Go home, boss,” Meis tries, as Lio jabs the down button. “We’re still just assessing the extent of the damage anyway.”

Gueira sticks out his chin. “Yeah, and with all due respect it’s not like _you’re_ gonna find what’s wrong. That’s why you’ve got engineers.”

They both look tired. They both look so goddamn tired. It’s unfair that they’re having to put on this upbeatness despite their life’s work sitting inert several floors below them.

Lio flattens his mouth into a pale smile. “Not with Foresight coming in on Friday.” He raises his hands, a placating gesture, as they open their mouths to protest. “It’s too important. I’ll be back.”

In the elevator, Lio scrapes the top half of his hair into a hair tie. Trying to move in this state is a lot like swimming: slow, taking place against an uncontrollable and unpredictable current, and chilly.

The promise of decent coffee keeps his feet moving under him through the floor-to-ceiling glass pedbridge connecting the lab building to the central hub in the Promepolis Science Complex. People pass him: harried-looking students, stressed-looking professors, administrators who look like they’ve got their lives together. Or at least more together.

Out here, away from concrete walls and custom-built machinery and salvaged office equipment, there’s enough space for a few deep inhales. Here the sun casts its warmth onto the world. The landscaping below the pedbridge has a soft roundness to it, cozy in its blanket of new snow. He slows the progress of his feet, observes this floor-to-ceiling view of the winter cityscape for a moment. It looks—a certain kind of charming; peaceful, almost.

If he could hold the world like this, frozen in glass and snow, perhaps it would not end in six months, swallowed by the rift. If he could slow the world’s entropy, perhaps it would buy the team time to take a break, to give them more presence of mind to save it.

He shrugs his coat around him. Nudges his feet to resume their movement. Hikes his messenger bag higher up onto his shoulder, tries to gentle the harshness of his heart, the flip side of that wish, the one that says that breaks under the circumstances are unwarranted.

Downstairs. Cool metal under his hand. A warm, coffee-smelling blast of air in his face. A yell from behind the counter:

“Heyyyy, it’s Dr Fotia! Good to see ya!”

Lio darts his gaze up, meets Galo’s eyes, lets surprise swallow him at that enthusiasm. Galo’s leaning on the counter on his hands, eyes crinkled, head tilted to one side, as though yesterday never happened. He’s so infuriatingly good-looking, the back and sides of his head neatly barbered, the blue comb of his hair carefully styled, the strength of his forearms on complete display, the muscle flexing under the sleeve of tattoos on his left arm.

Lio nods at him, tenses a bit. Nobody forgives _that_ quick.

There’s a bit of a line, maybe three people ahead of him at the counter, but Galo seems to have eyes only for him, even though he’s busy pulling shot after shot of espresso out of the machine in front of him. As the line ahead of Lio elapses, Galo peeks up at him from behind the counter, eyes him, leans back from the espresso machine, his hands progressing without him with professional ease. Maybe it’s that ocean-sized crush Aina told him about yesterday that makes him hold eye contact. Maybe it’s that Lio’s never seen any evidence of Galo being even remotely fearful, as a person.

“Galo,” Lio says, when finally he arrives at the register, where Aina surveys their interaction from behind the bakery case with crossed arms and a ready stance. “About yesterday—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Galo says, and then dares to _wink_ , as though the way Lio spoke to him is a cute little secret between them and not an awful thing that happened in full view of the entire cafe. “What can I get for you? You look like you’re toast, Doc, could use a boost.”

Lio opens his mouth. All he can really manage under the unsettling weight of Galo’s grace is: “Yeah.”

“You’re stressed cause you’re working on a big project, right?” Galo tips forward like he’s standing on his tiptoes behind the counter. “Aina tried explaining it to me. Her sister works on rift stuff, too, for the Hestians. Wish I was smart enough to get it.” He grins, bright-bright, like the conjunction of two galaxies.

In his shame Lio permits himself one single laugh, which he directs into the collar of his winter coat. “There’s only about five people who _do_ get everything about it. A general knowledge is enough to be informed. As long as you’re not conspiracy theorist-ing about it.” He shuts his eyes a second, visualizes the fried custom circuit boards Gueira showed him in the middle of the night. “It’s broken right now, which probably explains the.” He points at his own face. At the bags under his eyes he’s sure Galo can see.

“Oh, right,” Galo says, then a little too loudly: “Yeah, I definitely wouldn’t know anything about that!” He clears his throat, then smacks a hand onto the counter. “Well, you’ve been working hard, and hard work merits good coffee.” Then, in his most theatrical cadence: “Shall I ask again what would spark your fancy, dear scientist?”

At the same time they both say: “Soy latte, triple, extra hot,” except that Galo follows up immediately with, “but are you _absolutely_ sure you don’t wanna try something different? I’ve got a rose-scented sprinkle that’d taste _real_ good—”

A hand snaps its fingers in Galo’s face. “Did you not hear him?” Aina says, the customer-service edge in her voice as sharp as a shark fin. “You offer him fancy add-ons every time he comes in and he hasn’t once changed his order. Leave the good doctor in peace.”

“Thank you, Aina,” Lio says, humbled, and Aina backs up without letting up on her eye contact.

“I just want the Doc to know that there’s options. That there’s a whole world of coffee waiting for him.” But then Galo’s right off to his espresso station. A loudmouth, an energy cannon, but, for all that—a professional, when it comes down to it.

Lio inhales, then turns to Aina behind the till. “So—about yesterday,” he says, voice low as he fishes cash out of his wallet, making sure to tip 50%. It’s the least he owes. “What I said was really shitty.”

Aina nods. “It was, yeah.” She counts up his change and looks up at him like Lio’s got nuclear codes hidden behind his eyeballs. “Like I said, he was too sweet about it. I expect you to treat him better. The best, even. Star treatment from here on out. Understand me?”

“Why do I get the feeling you’re going to drown me while I’m wearing concrete shoes if I don’t?”

That shakes a laugh out of her, and she flicks her pink ponytail off her shoulder. “Just remember that I have the entire staff of the Rescue behind me on this topic, okay?”

Another sting of guilt fires through Lio’s gut. He glances at Galo, preoccupied as he is with the milk steaming attachment thingie on the espresso machine. “That bad, huh?”

“You don’t even know, Doc,” says Aina with the tone of one long resigned. “You have no idea.”

“Okay, wow, no pressure.” Lio dumps the coins into his wallet. “Good to know I won’t have to relocate my coffee-drinking activities, at least.”

“Yeah, that qualifies as a concrete shoes offence for sure. Plus we need our regulars.” Then Aina’s smiling, apparently mollified, but there’s a tightness to the corners of her mouth, a sleeplessness to the set of her eyes. “The margins are razor thin and we answer to Foresight, so.”

So. Yeah. Lio nods his own resignation. In the Science Complex, public funding be damned; they’re all under the same billionaire’s gun.

A clink of ceramic on tile. Galo sets the saucer and cup in front of Lio, turning them just so, and—there’s a dragon drawn in the foam, a pretty little dragon made of lobed swirls, breathing a leaf of flame.

“Ta-daa,” Galo announces, starbursting his hands open. “Whaddya think? Lucia’s trying to get us to do more things for the ’gram, tell me this counts.”

“Cute,” Lio whispers, his available energy to show outward approval depleted. But it’s the truth.

The foam in the cup jiggles on the latte as he carries it to the far back corner of the cafe, his favourite spot, all the way around the L-shaped bend of the cafe from the prep area. A photo is a must. He whips out his phone.

Lio Fotia  
@dr_fotia   
Morning latte courtesy of **@rescue_roastery**. Wonder if I could take this little friend back to the lab to help fix the tunneler? 9:32 AM - 15 December 2020  32  1.2k 

Within moments he starts getting responses:

dina 💜 SIGN THE PETITION, SEE MY PINNED  
@_erserud   
@dr_fotia CUTE 😭😭😭 9:34 AM - 15 December 2020  3 

Dr. Elspet Moore  
@ettenmoors   
@dr_fotia A clever reference to the late Deus Prometh’s seminal paper, “There be dragons? A theorem on dimensional resonance”? Your humour is, as always, unparalleled. 9:34 AM - 15 December 2020  6 16 

NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING  
@matoimochi   
@dr_fotia it matches ur shirt !!!!! 🔥🐉 so cute !! 💜 9:35 AM - 15 December 2020  4 

He’s really just scrolling—there’s always an initial blast of responses after he first tweets—but the last one catches his eye. He looks down at himself, and at the photo, in which the words “MOTHER OF DRAGONS” are on regrettable display behind the coffee cup. Oh, hey. Yeah. Fuck. He’s still wearing the last shirt on Earth. Good thing for him he didn’t post a selfie yesterday, otherwise someone’d be on him for fashion crimes. It’d be deserved.

He ignores the swirling exhaustion in his head. Demolishes the dragon, soaks in the atmosphere of the Rescue. He spends that time feeling like he lucked out, like Aina and Galo did him a solid welcoming him back. But the world keeps turning: even now Galo’s back to his wildly underpaid eight-hour-a-day dance at the espresso kiosk, a careful and precise pasodoble through order after order. The unearned forgiveness Galo gifted him doesn’t sit right with Lio. But he drinks his coffee, knowing that soon he, too, will be right back to his own overhurried dance.

***

On his way out the door after grabbing a cup of drip coffee to go, Galo stops him—shouts at him, really, from the counter. “ _DOC!_ ” 

When Lio whips round at Galo he nearly snaps involuntarily, his exhaustion pulling him so taut, but using the last shreds of presence of mind that he has—the caffeine is still working on him—he snaps his mouth shut, instead.

“Hm?”

Galo’s ray-of-sunlight grin is too bright. He hurries out from behind the counter to join Lio at the door. “We’ve got a holiday thing happening on Thursday night,” he says, offering one of the cafe’s business cards with a sharpie scrawl across it. There’s nothing about the card that suggests a holiday theme, just a time, Thursday’s date, and the words “see you there :)”.

Lio holds the card silently in front of him for a second, blinks up at Galo. “Why?”

For once Galo looks bashful. What a sight—this bright star of a man, reddening in the face, gathering his fingers together at the shaven back of his head, shrugging. “Just a few of us having a shindig. You’re a regular, one of our best. Thought maybe if you’re in the lab late, you’d wanna come down and have a snack. Remi and Varys’ll be playing music.” He rocks forward on his tiptoes. “And I’ll be debuting a couple new drinks that’ll knock your socks off. I’ve got a juniper drink in the works that totally destroys the competition.”

He has the absolute _gall_ to take his lower lip in his teeth in a completely unselfconscious way. Or—no, after Aina told him about that Pacific ocean crush, it actually _could_ be a conscious choice, it _could_ be an ouverture. But it’d be wildly imbalanced for Lio to remark on it, even to react. _Baristas don’t typically date their customers_. The very idea is disrespectful as hell, and he will not hold onto it. 

Better to be scientific about it. Keep a healthy distance tempered by objectivity.

But then Galo nails _that_ particular coffin shut for him: “Think about coming, yeah? It’d be nice to see you there.”

Lio tucks the card into his pocket. “Thanks. Kray’s visiting our lab on Friday. But I’ll probably need a break at some point on Thursday night.”

“Yeah, we’re getting a visit on Friday too. Remi and the Chief are getting kinda stressed about it, to be perfectly honest,” Galo says, but then breaks into his classic sunbeam grin and rocks back onto his heels. “Still though. Really would be great to see you. Oh, hey, hang on—” —he’s waving, waving to someone coming into the Rescue through the door behind Lio— “—Professor Imaishi! Welcome back! Hey, are you free on Thursday night?”

And he digs in his apron pocket, and pulls out a sharpie-scrawled business card, and delivers his pitch, and Lio’s free, he’s free, he doesn’t have to worry about keeping a healthy objective distance after all. Galo’s keeping it for him.

Cool. Cool. Fine. No, this is good, actually! It solves the customer-barista power imbalance issue! Relief and disappointment making a mess of his exhaustion-wired brain, he holds his cup of drip against the puffy front of his jacket and pushes out into the winter cold to take a walk around the block before heading back to the observation room.

***

“I can’t keep doing this. I keep going in circles.” It’s afternoon, and Gueira’s voice is muffled where he’s face-deep in one of the tunneler’s consoles. “Also, who the fuck designed this thing? Paging Dr Gueira, P.Eng.? What the fuck? I can’t even get in here all the way?”

“Shhh,” says Meis, covering the console’s intercom receiver with one hand in sleepy slow motion. “Don’t talk like that in front of our beautiful child. They’re full of very sensitive equipment.”

Gueira slams a hand against one side of the console’s pale-coloured housing. _Clongggg_. “Why don’t _you_ get _your_ pretty little boot off _my_ sensitive equipment and let me… ugh. We have surge protectors, insulation… electricians! We have electricians! Actual professionals! Stuff like this shouldn’t happen!”

Meis clicks his tongue. “Well, hitting the baby definitely won’t help it get better.”

The overhead fluorescents blaze greenly into Lio’s brain. He stares up from where he’s sitting crisscross applesauce, ass frozen, on the cold concrete of the platform. How did it come to this? How did it come to six to-go cups mouldering on the console, five take-out containers (costs not covered by the terms of their grant), four grad students they sent home because Lio couldn’t bring himself to make them stay late because they don’t get paid enough, and one splitting headache swiftly spiralling into dizzy giddiness?

Oh, right.

“Guys, I’m really feeling that ep coming,” he says nauseously, and blinks himself to standing. “I’m—gonna head upstairs, take my meds, put my head down, hope it passes.”

“You should go _home_ ,” Meis says.

“ _You_ go home,” Lio retorts, poutily.

“You first.”

“Nuh uh.”

“We should _all go home_.” Gueira’s voice sounds like he’s taken up residence inside a toaster. Which totally makes sense. “We’re all just gonna start making mistakes anyway. My stomach lining’s eroding as we speak from all the coffee and pizza. That ep’s coming.” He extracts himself, pushes up to standing, catches himself against the console when his ankles don’t quite co-operate, rights himself. A boat on a bad tide.

“Fine,” says Lio. He checks his phone. It’s 3:45 PM—but for over 24 hours of near-constant work interrupted only by occasional breaks to sing three-part sea shanties into the giant space around the Collider tube, that’s pretty good.

“I’ll drive us.” Meis pats his pockets, seeking keys, finding none. They’ll be upstairs in his coat. “You too, boss.”

Lio shakes his head. “I still have some Fridayish odds and ends to finish up. I’ll go to 5.” When Meis gives him a withering look he raises his hands. “But no later.”

“Fine. But only if you take _at least_ a power nap,” says Meis, and Lio can't find the words to argue.

So he heads back up to the lounge and turns off the lights. Grabs himself a blue gatorade out of the fridge. Takes his meds out of the bright purple Space-Invader-shaped pillbox he keeps in his bag. Rolls up his coat for a pillow so that he can hug the throw cushion against his chest. Pulls the blanket he's been wearing all day around his feet and his shoulders. Lies down on his side on the sofa and shuts his eyes around a spinning darkness.

Could be the big ep, which the meds should blunt the worst of. Could be the exhaustion; either way, unconsciousness hits him like a storm taking the coast.

Or—it should; he figures it should; but just as he thinks it does, the storm breaks in two around him. There’s a flash of white light, and a sensation like gasping without lungs; then the agony of an episode, just beginning to carve him, just the tip of the knife—and then—

***

Deep, working breaths. Brutal cold. The only point of heat a soft pressure on his mouth. Not the sensual pressure of a kiss. The slow sinking of a ship. Head and heart, drums. Lungs a bellows. He must not fail. He must not fail.

He burns, and the cold dissolves a bit, but still he aches.

He is flint, he is steel, he’s one car boosting another stranded at the side of the road. She is his cousin by necessity. For her he feels the desperate bedrock love one feels for their equal.

Now again with the lungs. And again. He is the hopeful bellows at the edge of life.

The fire catches in her at last. Then she reaches for him, and for a second he burns with hope too; but no, it’s not enough, and she goes slack again.

He moves without need for himself. Sets her hands into a rest position. Her body goes bleach-white. A thousand paper planes caught in the leading edge of a storm, her ashes rise on the ambient air current. Her shape contracts. She becomes smaller, and then she is nothing at all.

 _What the fuck,_ Lio thinks, screaming his anger voicelessly as he watches. _What the fuck? What the fuck was that? Let me out! Let me out—_

“From flame to ashes,” says the body, speaking without him. “From ashes to earth. Rest in peace.”

***

The darkness of the cave. Now that the breathing is done and she is done, he is but a lick of flame in a leather palm. Yet he feels the unfamiliar weight of his own clothes.

Galo sits crumpled on the floor past a split in the gathered dozens. He does not belong here. Nor does he waver.

“We can hear them,” his own self says without permission. “ _I want to burn. Let me burn hotter, harder, stronger. It’s too cold here. Let me out. Let me out._ ”

 _Listen,_ thinks Lio, hearing his own echo. _Listen to me—tell me what’s happening—_

Flinch, tightening resolve; _be quiet_ , says the body gently without voice. _Just be quiet and wait,_ long-suffering parent frustrated with uncooperative child.

More chatter. And then he is outside himself, being pulled and reshaped, and then he is the entire rear of the cavern, and all he sees is his own back, proud-stanced, leather-clad, a commander of this few dozen, this starving force—

—and then he’s being dismissed, slammed back into darkness, again a flash of light, again chill, again nausea—

***

Mouth tastes of sawdust and blood. Stomach crawls with hunger and frustration. Palms quivering in the aftermath of agony—shivering, shaking, chills—fluorescent lights overhead, scratch of sofa underneath, the sudden, urgent press of nausea—throwing blanket on floor—stumbling in search of—

Lio arrives at the plastic garbage can, tucked around the corner of the lounge, barely in time. Some of his sick hits the floor. In the reeling post-vomit distance from himself he always experiences, he thinks, _wow, I don’t remember eating kale recently,_ staring into his own splashed sick.

Then he pukes again. Aims this time.

He grips the sides of it till he can count to sixty without heaving. Then he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, the bottom of his tee, determines that he must head to the bathroom. The lounge is empty; no one would’ve seen him puke, which is fine, but there’s something—

There’s something off. Something’s way off.

Lio scans the room with his gaze. Reason clicks when his eyes land on the window. Early morning sunlight. His eps don’t usually last that long. Certainly if he was having a really long one, someone would’ve sat vigil with him—it’s just what you do, not least because long ones can be deadly, but also because in a workplace made mostly of people with rift syndrome that’s just what you _do_. He’ll have to roast the team to their faces when he’s feeling less like an unwiped butthole.

He opens and closes his fists. Maybe they left because he had an ep and then fell asleep. Or maybe he fell asleep then had the ep just now. It’s probably not actually a roast-worthy offence. It just doesn’t feel like any time has passed at all.

Breathe. It’s—Wednesday, now. Time’s burning. Kray’s two and a half days away. Even so, there’s time to wash his face and rinse his mouth out.

Bathroom. He gets there with his hand tracing the way on the wall. Three sinks, two stalls. He relieves himself in the urinal. Adheres to procedure, to make sure he gets through all the steps. Like this: hot water, apply to face. Scrub at eyes. Rinse out mouth, twice, thrice, four times. He should head home, grab a shower, but it’s an hour away, out in Rhodes, and if he’s slept through the night, that means he’s behind taking care of everything. There are emails to be sending. Slides to be prepping for Friday.

So he stares at himself in the mirror, hair a haystack the cows have got into. Sucks his vomit-scoured teeth. 

Something’s still off.

Aha. Lio glances down at his body in the mirror, sees that he’s not wearing yesterday’s tee. Someone has had the kindness to change him out of “MOTHER OF DRAGONS” (rip) into this black, soft thing, several sizes too large. There’s an embroidered patch on the breast pocket. The golden, round, cut-edged blazon of the Rescue Roastery. This is not, he reflects with the dazed attention of someone who has not really slept, a shirt he owns. His legs show similar evidence of tampering. Oversized gray sweats unevenly cuffed to the mid-ankle.

Someone changed his clothes but didn’t stick around. Okay. Lio flaps his lips like a horse. Kind of them. Well, anyhow. He’ll manage. He always does.

He pulls his hair out of its haystacked ponytail, scrapes it back up into his hand, holds it tight against his scalp, re-does the knot. Considers texting Meis and Gueira but finds his phone an inert brick, and so is forced to abandon his previous roasting plans. Shrugs his shoulders up around his ears, heads back to his office, folds his blanket back onto the back of his chair, plugs his phone in, grabs his coat. Puts it on as he crosses the pedbridge to get coffee. At least coffee’s goddamn reliable.

***

Or not? He gets there, pulls at the Rescue’s door, finds it locked. It’s dark inside. Snow drifts past the outer windows, piling against the window-ledges. The chairs are up on the tables. The bakery cases are empty or covered.

He looks at the schedule sign. It’s supposed to be open on Wednesdays. The sky’s a morning-coloured overcast; they should be open, surely. He squints inside again through a cloud of his own breath on the glass, then shrugs his shoulders up to his ears again like it’ll keep him warmer, clutches his coat close, and backs off. Not like standing out here freezing to death will fix anything.

***

Braving the nightmarish early morning cold, Lio tromps through snowdrifts to an off-campus chain and procures a couple of mealy mass-baked scones along with an extra-large coffee with two extra-large-sized creams. All he tastes is dairy.

He searches his brain for something else to think about than the slides he still has to finalize. There’s a pivot table that needs his attention, now that Meis and Gueira have confirmed their teams’ hours. But all that comes to him is the too-real, too-long, too-detailed glimpse of the Cold Side he got via dream. He's never had one that long or complete before. He's never gotten information from one. He remembers the woman turning to windblown ash in front of him as he watched. Galo’s confused face dawning with slow understanding. The way his body moved like someone else was behind the wheel.

Walking back into the Science Complex is eerie as fuck, now that he’s sort-of-properly awake. There should be students heading into the big Wednesday morning matrix theory lecture, but there’s no one on the ground floor, and the lecture hall is silent behind its doors, totally devoid of the sound of Professor Imaishi’s voice on the mic. No feet clicking on the industrial-strength flooring. Nobody streaming towards him down the stairs. With the world all in-betweeny like this, the places behind his ears flare up like he’s being watched, but there’s never anyone there.

He heads to his office, grabs his laptop and his phone, points himself at the observation room in hopes of finding Meis and Gueira preoccupied with the machine. And he does hear voices when he gets there, past an ajar door, but they don’t belong to his team. Time for an interdepartmental confrontation! Luckily Lio is a professional confronter! He shoves the door open with a hip, starts with “What are you d—?”, and then halts.

Kray Foresight takes up three quarters of the room just by standing in it. His muscle—that is to say, his assistant, Biar Colossus—takes up the rest. They turn at the sound of Lio entering, Biar annoyed, Kray placidly amused.

“Uh,” Lio says, and tightens his hand on the lip of the worktable by the door. “What a surprise. Sorry, sir, I didn’t think you were coming in today.”

“I admit it was optimistic for us to come in expecting red carpet treatment, but I had hoped to see more of your team hard at work. What a surprise for me to find that not only was there not a full complement on site today, but there was _no one_ here to welcome us.” Kray’s got this light, oily, sweet voice, and spends the pauses between sentences removing his gloves. “Why don’t you come in and sit.” He motions toward one of the guest chairs, then takes a seat at Lio’s place.

No. No way he’s going to let this throw him off his game. Lio smiles his most diplomatic smile at Biar and sits. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Kray laughs lightly, hands his gloves off to Biar, folds his hands on his knee. “I’m surprised you’re in such a good mood, Dr Fotia. Has there been some development of which I’m unaware, since our previous conversation?”

Lio blinks rapidly, twice, tries to think back to the last time they spoke. It would’ve been in September, at their last quarterly progress meeting. Lio remembers reporting on how close they were to sending a human through the tunnel if only they could make a few repairs and modifications after unsuccessful test number two. Kray had seemed pleased.

“That was a useful conversation, if I recall correctly,” Lio says, folding his arms over his chest. “You feel differently?”

“No,” says Kray. “Not given that I haven’t received the revised report I requested. As a result I am _re-committed_ , I think, to the idea of handing off the project. After all, people are suffering.” A soft theatrical tone enters his voice, as though this sudden confusing nonsense isn’t a massive blow to Lio’s stomach and head, enough to bring stomach acid soaring right back up into his throat. “We don’t have time to waste, and given that the Hestians are on the verge, it may be that a university institution that doesn’t have time to devote completely to this essential project is not the best place for fast work to happen. Would you agree?”

Lio squints through his nausea, rights himself. “ ‘The Hestians are on the verge.’ What does that mean.”

Here Kray and Biar exchange glances, a mirrored raising of the eyebrows. Kray returns to him more amused than ever, more smiling. “I certainly hope it’s because of your work on repairing the tunneler that you are behind on your news in the field, Dr Fotia. What it means is that the race is imminently to be won. It means that, two previous failures notwithstanding, given the enormous expense of transitioning the project to another team, I am willing to give your team a last reprieve.” He stretches out his fingers, re-folds them. “You have two days to repair your machine and establish a stable tunnel to the Cold Side.”

Fire and cold surge from Lio’s feet to the crown of his head. His heart flares. A _reprieve_. What the fuck? What the fuck is he talking about?

He composes himself through tight teeth: “That’s impossible, Mr Foresight. We’re still working on assessing the extent of the damage.”

Again that beatific smile. What, so Foresight thinks his presence alone is a blessing? “Are you saying you can’t do it, _Doctor_ Fotia?”

“Like I said. You’re asking the impossible.” Clearly Lio missed an email. A memo. A fucking webinar.

“Hm. That’s a shame,” Kray says, and lifts a finger at Biar, who pulls out her phone to take a note. “I understand that you have—a closeness with the Rescue Roastery.”

“One, I don’t see the relevance; two, not sure where you’d get that idea.”

Kray doesn't look at him. Casts his gaze around the room, taking its survey. “In addition to being your primary investor, I am also theirs. If your lab successfully repairs the machine and establishes a stable tunnel before the Hestians can, I’ll be able to infuse your project _and_ the Rescue Roastery with additional funds. You’ll be able to complete a dozen foundational studies on the tunnel, on the Cold Side. They’ll be able to add additional space or open a second location.”

There’s blood on the air. Kray’s waiting for him to bite. Lio’s always gotten a weird vibe off the guy, but he’d figured that was the inevitable rich people vibe. The creepy active-threat vibe is new.

“And if we don’t?” Lio asks, voice coming out smaller than he means it to.

“If you don’t,” and Kray is smiling brighter than ever, “the Rescue will be shuttered, your lab will lose the project, and I’ll personally see to it that the Rescue’s staff never work in coffee again.”

Lio uncrosses his arms, crosses them again. “You’re better than threats, _Mister_ Foresight.”

“Alas,” Kray says, and stands, still smiling, “I am not. There is too much at stake to resort to anything less. I believe I have been more than reasonable to date in extending your deadline multiple times and supplying you with funding increases.” He opens a hand out to one side; Biar hands him his gloves, and he begins to put them on.

“Give us more time. _Two days?_ You’re asking the impossible.”

“Time is, as you have so rightly said, of the essence, Dr Fotia,” Kray says, and turns for the door. Biar follows him out after one last scalpel look at Lio, who listens to the retreating clicking of their shoes on the industrial-strength institutional flooring. Sinks down into his chair just. To process.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> death warning starting at "Deep, working breaths" and ending at "What the fuck."--but if you made it all the way through the film, it will be familiar.
> 
> emetophobia warning for the section starting at "Mouth tastes of sawdust and blood" and ending at "There’s something off. Something’s way off."
> 
> leave me a comment if you want--they honestly help at times like this!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> blomp
> 
> yes this Lio is nearly 30 pls just roll w/ it
> 
> content notes for this chapter are mainly to do with medical stuff, but there is no gore. see end of chapter note for spoilery details!

The first thing he does once he’s no longer insensate from confusion is pick up his phone to check for texts. He has to turn it on first, and it glows up at him from his thigh while it goes through the motions of waking up. When he opens his groupchat with Meis and Gueira, the most recent notes aren’t very helpful. Mostly just confusing as hell. Apparently yesterday evening they were drunk-texting him:

 _where did you go boss?????_  
_come onnnnnn were quitting early 2 drink our sorrows away !!!_  
_we’re heading to the Motorcycle Club u better meet us there_  
_k well we’’re buying shots and were gonna injoy them w/ or w/o u so join us wenever_

Which then descended into:

 _boss we love u sm_  
_truly truly truly_  
_come 2 our house rn were keepin the party goin_  
_WOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!_

And so on, and so on, until about 11 PM, when, bless them, they probably realized he wasn’t showing and gave up.

He frowns into the message thread, rubbing his thumb up and down against the screen just to have something to do. It’s uncharacteristic of Meis and Gueira to go on a bender on a Tuesday night—they’re even more too-old-for-this-shit than Lio is at age 29. And what happened to that parental attitude of going home to rest? Had that all been for nothing?

Heart shimmying wildly inside him, Lio texts, _where are you guys?_ and _I need your help down in the office right now_.Then he lets his arms relax with an _oof_ like it takes effort. Tucks his phone into his pocket. Stares at the ceiling like it’ll yield a next step for him to take.

It doesn’t; it just sort of pulses and swirls. Lio settles on food for next steps. He chews slowly at his mass-baked chain-donut-shop scones and slams the rest of the coffee.

Halfway through scone number two, it settles into him: Kray’s given them _two days_. Two days. He pulls his hand back through his hair, gets his middle finger caught in the hairtie, pulls out the tie entirely, lets it sit around his wrist like a bracelet. Lets a guttural moan of frustration escape him because hell, there’s apparently no one on campus anyway, the whole place is cleared out for no reason he can tell, no one will hear him, no one will care.

It’s only the thing he’s worked his entire career for. That’s all it is. It’s only completely vulnerable to human vicissitude. Just a house of cards in an ill wind.

***

Two-day deadline notwithstanding, Lio knows he’s not going to get anything done alone, nauseous, exhausted, freezing to the bone, screaming into his desk, and running on nothing but shitty scones. So he gets on public transit and heads home. Traffic’s bizarrely attenuated for a Tuesday morning. Something’s off. _Everything’s_ off.

At the back of the bus, tucked in his massive coat, he settles in for the ride and gets out his phone. Reluctantly he pops his Twitter app open—time to catch up.

The first thing that hits him is a share from a high-energy physics friend of his in Italy. The article comes with the title “Hestian laboratory completes Cold Side communicator”. It’s probably the best the reporter could do on such short notice—the article’s succinct, offers very little detail on what it means that the parallel resonance emitter’s been finished, doesn’t say anything about when they plan on booting it up. What he knows is that the team on the project is legit. They’re practically colleagues; he should be happy for them. They’re all working toward the same goal.

He scrolls back up to the top of the article to look at the photo again. It’s an early render of the PRE that he remembers them using in a conference talk a year ago. Dated, but probably whatever they could manage to get.

—Saturday.

He blinks, slides his eyes over the date again. Saturday the second? No, that’s not right. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday. It’s Wednesday morning. The 16th. The tunneler test was on Monday the 14th, he stayed up all night through the 15th, had an ep at some point, today it’s the 16th, the day he puked in the garbage and woke up in someone else’s clothes. The timestamp’s wrong.

He doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to do with this.

Just as a check on himself he sleeps his phone, lights it back up again, checks the home screen.

Saturday—

As he exits the bus, bag slung over one shoulder, coat big and puffy on him, he tries to be casual with the driver: “Remind me, it’s Friday, right?”

“Saturday, my friend,” says the driver, chewing, staring out the windshield ahead of him, not looking quite at Lio. “Looks like you got one less day in the weekend than you thought. One less day till the end of the world.” He laughs half to himself, looks ready to drive to his next stop.

“Not my lucky day,” says Lio, heart winding up into his throat like it means to punch him in the tonsils, and hops off.

***

He’d like to take a long shower, in this ridiculous amount of empty space he calls an apartment. It’s not that there’s a lot of floor space, it’s that it’s an old building with ten-foot ceilings, so he gets this clutch of beautiful but cavernous and hard-to-heat rooms all to himself until the lease is up in three months. He can’t really afford not having a housemate, but he also hasn’t had time to scout one out, not with the tunneler deadline looming; and anyway, if Gueira and Meis hadn’t decided to get married and shack up with the dream of eventually becoming full-time dog parents, Lio would’ve probably lived with them indefinitely. It’s been hard getting used to the idea of them not being around.

Still, resentment attacks him in the chest. If they would just pick up the damn phone and text back—no. They’re probably just sick, if he’s being honest with himself. He pushes that resentment away, tries not to feel it. He takes that avoidance with him into the shower. Too-hot just-right water, hot pink shower puff, grapefruit body wash. The water pressure’s garbage here, but he makes up for it with the heat of the water. Scrubs off that layer of skin, seals the moisture back in with a layer of lotion. Like this, he’s practically functional.

In his room, though, he immediately finds another _something_. He’s already faced the outfit that isn’t his. Then Kray in his fucking lab levying fucking threats. Then goddamn Saturday.

Now this: a clean load of laundry, neatly folded and sorted, laid out for him like a gift.

He flexes and unflexes the fingers of one hand. Heart rate ticks up. Lio glances corner to corner like he’s looking for an intruder, one who apparently does laundry and knows how he likes his clothes sorted. The socks folded together instead of balled. The t-shirts file-folded, stacked together vertically, sorted by colour, the many blacks separated from the two white tees.

Lio lets his hand hover over the pile of clothes long enough to absorb that this tidiness he did not leave behind when he last left the apartment is real. Then he remembers he’s freezing his ass off in a towel and gets dressed. Black jeans. Black tee. He thinks about the oversized Rescue tee in his hands, soft, worn, grossly oversized, and feels the embroidered patch with his thumb.

A reminder of a memory he should have, but does not.

Lio swallows, sits heavily down on the bed, which wobbles under his weight. He figures, memory loss. Plenty of people with rift syndrome report visions and memory loss during their eps, while their minds are being yanked into a parallel universe where their life essence gets burnt for magic.

But the memory loss is usually only a few minutes per ep. He’s never heard of anyone experiencing fugue. He’s never lost _days_ to an episode before.

Lio drags himself to the living room and picks up his phone. Then back to the bedroom, where in the deeply necessary warmth of the blankets he swipes around and finds his calendar, finds Friday, _yesterday_ in reality if not in spirit, and swipes down to the big visit with Kray, the one he cleared his afternoon for.

 _Our last conversation_ , Kray had said.

With a belly-deep inhale Lio calls Meis. Lets the phone ring until it hits Meis’s voicemail.

He doesn’t quite throw the phone across the room, that’d be a waste of energy, but if he _could_. Fuck, did the world tip over and dump out everyone who matters? He curls over his phone like a pillbug. If only he could _think_. If only he could shake off this caffeine-jittery post-ep fog long enough, he might be able to figure something out—

Okay. Okay. Plan. A plan. (Phone tight in hand, knuckles creaking with the squeeze.) Jitters mean hunger, sometimes. Food. Protein. That’s not a waste of energy. Then doctor. (Tighter now.) Someone else can look at him and tell him nothing’s wrong with him, that it’s all in his head, and that he’s fine to go back to work and get the tunneler up and running again. Someone else can do that for him. (Heart punching at his ribs.)

Okay. Okay. Feet on ground. Stand up. Eat. Drink. That much he still has the wherewithal to do.

***

Sure, maybe the world’s crumbling around him, but now at least his belly’s full of grocery store freezer dumplings. He’s got a hot pink thermos full of hot honey lemon in his bag. And he’s got on his biggest, fuzziest comfort socks. So. Trending vaguely upwards.

He reasons it out like this as he gets on a bus for urgent care. He reasons it out, like, if he’s not, say, at 30%, he won’t be able to fix anything about the tunneler. His team will suffer, and like Gueira said he’ll start introducing errors. He sucks at the lip of his thermos, eyes lost in the middle distance as the bus jostles him over the unsealed pot holes in the road.

Urgent care is a nightmare. He walks in and it’s like an apocalypse event, and when he tells the triage nurse he’s there for a rift syndrome episode, she raises her eyebrows and directs him to a specially cordoned-off area. It takes up most of the waiting area, and a couple dozen people crowd the space, all of them drawn, shivering, nauseous, and hurting. At their worst, several of them are lying down, blue-lipped, on their sides, across a few seats. There are children crying, and whether it’s for their caregivers’ pain or for their own is unclear. There’s nowhere to sit, but there are plenty of emergency blankets. A sea of ice-blue wool stamped with the Foresight Pharmaceuticals logo. Lio has the option to stand or wait on the floor. If this is urgent care, he can’t think what the emergency room must look like.

He’s seen and experienced mass episodes before. Since he and Meis and Gueira met, he’s had lots with them. If he’s about to have an ep, most likely one or both of them will, too. But nothing like this. Nothing on the scale of dozens. This is a harrowing confusion.

He sits on the floor near a blanket-wrapped elder who offers him a herbal lozenge out of a paper bag. He accepts; it tastes like honey and menthol. Under her pale blue blanket the elder has on a cute outfit, matching pants and jacket in a dusty pink colour, like this urgent care visit is an outing worth dressing up for, and her hair is tidily curled.

“Too many people here,” says the elder, rubbing her one arm with the other, and shakes her head. “I don’t like what it says about what might happen next.”

“How do you mean?” Lio asks. With strangers it’s always hard to tell whether they’re talking about the rift in conspiracy terms, until you press them further. 

The elder shrugs pinkly. “It’s just a feeling,” she says. “That there’s something big coming. Couldn’t say what.”

Lio nods slowly, rolls the lozenge around from cheek to cheek. “Do you mind if I ask—did you see anything, when you had your episode?”

“I always do,” says the elder, and selects a lozenge of her own from the inside of the bag. “Most people don’t, but I always do. I got on a meditation and lucid dreaming kick a few years ago. Haven’t had to come to the doctor a single time for my episodes until now because of it.”

Ever skeptical, Lio doubts that this is the single superior option for managing one’s rift syndrome, but he’s heard of way more improbable treatments, cf. Gueira’s mother’s groupchat. “So you—use it to—see the other side more clearly?”

“Sometimes,” says the elder, twitching her nose almost rabbitlike as she looks at the drifting snow outside. Her lips are only a little blue. “Look at the snow, how it drifts down so slowly, in thousands of pieces. The cars pass through it without interrupting the flow. When I’m in the episode, I think of myself that way. Like snow, or like light. Millions of little particles unperturbed by the worst of it. Then I bring myself back together again in the place where I want to be.”

“Hmm,” Lio says. He’s not going to get into wave-particle duality with this poor person. Certainly he would’ve in first-year university. Instead he reaches into his bag for his wallet. “Would you watch my bag for me? I’ll go get us some bottled water.”

“Thank you, dove,” says the elder, and pats his hip as he gets up.

On his way back with an armload of water bottles from the nearest vending machine, someone recognizes him. And then someone else. He hands out most of the water—he’d been planning on it anyway—and accepts a shy request from a riftie kid in her teens to take a selfie together. She shivers, and she smiles. For the most part people leave him alone, only occasionally chirping at him: “Dr Fotia!” “You too, huh?” “How’s that machine?” This level of attention he’s not used to—even on a normal night out, rifties are few and far between even in Promepolis. He tucks his chin into his winter coat, shakes hands when they’re offered him, makes sure to smile. It’s his responsibility.

When he gets back to the seat his elder conversation partner was sitting in, it’s empty. He offers it to someone else, sets them up with a water bottle and blanket, waits for his number to come up.

He gets his five minutes eventually. The urgent care physician looks brutally exhausted—and annoyed to see him. He puts his walls up immediately. He won’t get jack shit out of her. Woe betide the patient whose doctor thinks them a burden! Speaking in a bored patter, she checks his pupils, his heart rate, his temperature, and his blood pressure, asks him about his medication history. He tells her he takes Foresitam, of course, which she should know, because it’s the only rift syndrome drug in town and there’s no generic.

Predictably, she schedules him no follow-up tests for his several days of memory loss and gives him a diagnosis of “probably just more of what you already have, you should count yourself lucky”, then offers to write him a scrip for a stronger dosage of Foresitam. And an antiemetic. He turns her down on the second one. He might as well just take an edible.

He walks out more drained than when he walked in. Still. Hard to be disappointed when your expectations are already swimming around somewhere in the Earth’s mantle.

While he waits for the bus, he tries calling Gueira. Now it’s not about whether they’re ignoring him, it’s about whether they’ve been caught in the mass ep too, and whether they have everything they need, or whether they’re stuck in some overcrowded waiting room. When he seats himself in the bus he vibrates his leg to let off some of the steam, and tries letting off the rest of it by opening up Twitter. He’s useless, though. Just scrolls for the sake of scrolling. Doesn’t actually see anything on the screen.

He gets it together enough to tweet, but only because he’s written posts like this one too many times to count:

Lio Fotia  
@dr_fotia   
We need backup every single day, not just when we experience mass episodes. But if you’re fresh from hearing the news about the mass ep in Promepolis, start by giving to the Promepolis Rift Syndrome Mutual Aid Fund. lin.ky/6nfST0bm 10:53 AM - 19 Dec 2020  3.3k  9.1k 

He lets the tweet sit in front of him for a few minutes as the winter city passes by his window, building by building, the whole landscape rendered ashen by today’s silver overcast and a little grimy at the corners by the traffic-stained slush lining the edges of the street.

 _Ping ping ping_ , go the notifications as they pile up.

liam kerr  
@particlelementary   
@dr_fotia Is this the best way to support the community? Better would be for us to contribute to a registered charity, wouldn’t it? Something like the Foresight Community Fund? I think you’d get more donors that way... 10:55 AM - 19 Dec 2020  26 122 

Adamm Padilla  
@adamm_smasher   
@dr_fotia everybody on this thread talking about how they dont believe in mass episodes needs to watch this documentary they just released on n*tfl*x called “rift sick” PLEASE educate yrselves 10:55 AM - 19 Dec 2020  7 23 

NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING  
@matoimochi   
@dr_fotia just shared this 2 my friends & sent what i could, ty 4 the reminder 💜 how r u doin? 11:01 AM - 15 December 2020  5 

He hearts @matoimochi’s post. They’re a stalwart with extremely pure intentions, even if they sometimes have a bit of a reply guy cadence to their posts. Lio followed them back a year ago and has enjoyed it, because other than RTing mildly annoying pop science videos about the rift, they only really post two things: progress shots of really nice mecha models under construction, and time-lapse videos of said progress with pop-punk blasting over them. Like, sure, Lio goes to Twitter to keep up on the latest drama in the dimensional sciences. But when he needs a little relief he clicks over to his “robots in disguise” list to admire people’s craft. @matoimochi’s not the most preternaturally talented craftsperson on the planet, but they’re enthusiastic. That holds Lio’s interest.

Lio Fotia  
@dr_fotia   
@matoimochi Thanks. I’ll be ok. It’s more impetus to keep working on the tunneler. 11:03 AM - 19 Dec 2020  1 

Then he mutes his original tweet, because the replies are rolling in, and they’re more than he can handle.

 _Ping_. A message notification pops up over his Twitter app. Something. Finally.

It’s not from the groupchat.

Lio scrunches his eyebrows, pops open the message.

 _hey u got home ok yestrday ?_  
just checkin in on u I hope ur doin ok  
txt me ur address I made too many lasagnas!! ill bring u one !

Lio blinks, scans the number, doesn’t recognize it. But apparently he’s interacted with it before, because above the two latest texts are two others: Lio initiated, by sending a dragon emoji; the other number sent back ... a chicken. Okay?

His thumb hesitates over the screen. He could be honest to this total stranger, like, _I’m not really okay but also I’m fine, thanks for asking, by the way who the hell are you and how did you get my number?_ But that would—not be helpful, and he figures he’s in no shape to be having a conversation anyway, so he pockets the phone.

In his absorption, he forgets to stop off at the junction where he’s supposed to transfer to his homeward bus. Well. Might as well head back to campus anyway. He’s got less than two days to fix his fucking tunneler, and his help is MIA. He needs all the time with the machine that he can get.

***

He sits in the observation room in his blanket, opens up his trello board on his laptop, and squints at the cards to try to figure out what exactly he and the team have done on the tunneler since he last remembers being awake. It looks like they’ve cleaned up the data from the failed test, though it’s impossible for him to tell whether Roula and Eko have started modelling anything with it yet, since the modelling card is listed as _In Progress_ with no comment. He checks the engineering cards next, sees that Gueira’s team has successfully identified all the parts of the machine that are busted beyond repair and are working on getting or printing replacements.

That’s something. That’s also not stuff that can get fixed in two days.

He puts his hair into a fresh ponytail, opens up the modelling program that Eko wrote, and lets the computer churn through the data. And then someone buzzes in his pocket. It’s Meis. He puts him on speaker just in case his husband is there too.

Meis sounds shitty enough that any frustration Lio may have been holding onto dies on his tongue. “Sorry, boss. Brutal morning.”

Gueira sounds just as bad: “You get home okay?”

“Well, I don’t think the mass ep got me. I’m surviving.”

Meis laughs dully. “Surviving, huh? When’s the last time you had a meal with a vegetable in it?”

Lio half-laughs. “That’s unfair, Meis, don’t attack me like that.” Thinks back to the vomit he upchucked earlier today, winces— “I don’t think dumplings count, so. I think yesterday. Not that I remember anything about it.”

Gueira’s breath is a wind against the mic. “Was afraid you’d say that.”

“Why?”

In the space of a brief silence, Gueira and Meis come to some agreement about what to say. Then: “Boss, you’ve been misremembering shit all week,” Meis says. “Or forgetting it completely.”

Lio swallows. “Yeah, well. Urgent care says I’m good, apparently, so.”

“Sure they did,” Gueira says, spitting laughter. “Saw rift syndrome on your chart and called it a day. Have you tried drinking more water? Using a hot water bottle? Changing your diet? I hear we have to all stop eating raw foods now. The latest in cutting-edge medical advice from my mom’s groupchat. Like, have you rubbed A535 on it?”

Lio crinkles his face. “On what?”

“On all of it, I guess? On the whole body?”

“You _have_ to get her to quit that thing,” Meis says.

“You say that as though I haven’t tried. As though I’ve got any real influence on her whatsoever.”

“ _Ughh._ ”

“Guys,” Lio says, as mildly as he can. “Tell me you’re coming in today to work on this thing.”

“No way, boss,” says Gueira, his usual enthusiasm at a quarter of its normal capacity. “That ep’s like, still there. Biding its time. It’s fuzzy in the background, but it’s waiting to hit again.”

Meis sounds apologetic, not that he _should_ , not that either of them should be apologizing for taking care of themselves. It’s just bad timing. “To be honest, we only called back because we love you. We didn’t call back as co-workers, we called back as your friends.”

Guilt sinks deep in Lio. He stares into the air halfway between him and the phone, trying to do the mental math.

“Sorry, I just—” Lio stops, refocuses. “There’s an emergency. Kray said he’ll fire our team from the tunneler if we don’t get a stable tunnel back in the next two days. Specifically, before the Hestians do.”

He doesn’t mention the Rescue. Meis and Gueira don’t deserve to have that unreasonable guilt on them.

“There’s no way,” says Meis. “It’s not possible. Like, we made you come in yesterday, yeah, but this is a weekend and we need the rest. _All_ of us.”

Gueira’s just an echo behind him. “Two days to fix the whole damn thing? Who does he think he is?”

“I told him flat out that it was impossible.”

“You can tell him it’s fucking absurd, is what it is,” Gueira snaps.

“Anyway, boss, we’re not coming in. We have so many blankets on us,” says Meis. “You’re welcome to come join the snuggle pile, if you can get over here.”

“That sounds lovely, and also brutal,” Lio says, and puts his hands back through his hair. “I’m really sorry. I think I’ll try to stick it out and make some progress on the model.”

“You should be taking the weekend, and fuck Kray very much.” Then Meis sighs like his face is right against the phone. “Boss, we gotta go. Fading fast. To cold to be much use.”

Lio swallows hard. “You two want me to call you some dinner? Pay me back later.” Not that he’ll accept such a thing. “I gotta order for myself anyway.”

“Sure, boss,” says Gueira. “That’d help.”

The call ends. Lio texts to the groupchat, _send me your order_ , and doesn’t stop harassing them for it until they do. They’ll eat if he has to bring it to them himself, the damned idiots.

***

After ordering dinner, and after getting some guidance from Meis via text on where the team last left off with the modelling, Lio moves himself and a couple of the laptops to the lounge. It’s nice to be aboveground instead of in a windowless concrete box. The drifting snow is a distraction from the fact that—according to the version numbers—the tunneler’s operational program has apparently had to be restored to a backup because of the virus Lucia unleashed on Monday. Which, like the melting of the equipment, shouldn’t be possible, because the operational machine runs on fucking Linux. Mouth full of delivery pizza, bland and gummy but serviceable, Lio thinks he should probably hire Lucia just to keep her out of trouble.

The pizza isn’t good, but it keeps him from feeling like a helium balloon. His earlier caffeination is gone. A cold shard remains under his ribs like the broken-off tip of a knife. Stress-sweat prickles in his armpits and elbowpits and kneepits.

The sky’s snow-cityglow-red outside the lounge windows by the time he finally gives up. He’s no programmer, he’s not even the best theoretician he knows, not since meeting Meis; he’s a project manager. He’s the guy who lights fires under people’s asses and makes sure that all the parts of the project are happening at the right pace. There’s a lot he can do on his own, but without someone to catch him up, he’s lost. And stuff like the model—any analysis on that will, done right, take more time than he has. It turns out he’s just spinning his wheels.

Images of the urgent care centre full of withering people blurs the lines on the screen in front of him. Information swims back into itself—the information’s not useless, it’s that he’s _making_ it useless. And not a gram of it does he process. Anything that enters his brain does not stay.

When he has to hit undo three times in a row, that’s when he knows he’s done.

He abandons the work. Disposes of the empty pizza box. Sways over to the sofa in his blanket. Scrolls through about ten Twitter posts without registering them, then gives up. Zones out watching an old favourite episode of _Robot Wars_. Tips over slowly, eventually rests his cheek on the cushion, and ignores the latest message on his phone from the unknown number. _hey, sorry if im botherin u, are u ok? did i say something?_

Falls asleep in the lab with his blanket around him, just like that.

***

Darkness, heat, then cold, a flash of light, a familiar siphoning feeling, _pop._ Square hallway, fluorescent lights, bone-deep cold. Armed people ahead and behind. Meis and Gueira to either side, a tension suspended between them. They await the signal.

Hands restrained, fingers frozen together like hot dogs in a pack.

The body shakes head, inhales, works fists in box, asks him to burn. He is a wisp of volatile gas. The body holds the spark. Up he goes, in flame.

Like this it is finally warm enough. To burn is the only way.

Searing cold descends on him. _Do it again,_ he thinks, enraged. _Do it again._

The body complies. Again blazing heat, again wretched cold. Again fire, again ice. And again, until finally he bursts free.

More talking. More fighting. For a second he blacks out completely. Then yelling. Flames—which he is—in his hands, punching heads. A car, indoors for reasons that only dream logic can explain. He slides along the ground to escape it. 

He guides the gathered crowd to the outside. Shivering people he recognizes from the urgent care waiting room. They are cousins by necessity.

 _Just a little longer,_ says the second voice in him. _Just need you to keep burning a little longer. We’re almost there._

And then he is flame, head to toe, and in the heart of its force he is flying, he is flying, the landscape elapsing below, into forest, into mountains—

“Thank you,” his own voice whispers when he lands among the trees. Snowflakes kick up from the ground and drift back down around him. He could be like that snow, he thinks, like the elder told him. He could split himself into a thousand snowflakes, become a wave-particle unperturbed by obstacles—

But in actual fact he is a mere flash of light in an endless blackness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content notes for this one include going to a non-emergency-but-still-urgent-care situation in a hospital where there are many people present seeking care; an encounter with an insensitive-because-overworked physician; brief mentions of medication; and one mention of, hm, a drug that might not be as legal in your area as it is in mine B);;;
> 
> all of those things can be avoided if you stop reading at "Urgent care is a nightmare." and pick up again at "He walks out more drained than when he walked in." if you do end up skipping that section, the main things that happen are: (1) Lio talks to an elder person w/ rift syndrome who tells him about the meditation techniques she uses to ride out her episodes; and (2) he talks to a doctor about his Foresitam prescription. it's a medication that acts as a buffer against rift syndrome episodes, and it is unavailable as a generic.
> 
> leave me a comment if u made it this far <3!!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome to 7k+ of self-indulgence HOP ON BOARD KIDS WE'RE HEADING FOR TENDERTOWN! IT's PINE TIME!!!!
> 
> content warnings with spoilers are in the endnotes 💜

He wakes up, head spinning, with his cheek pillowed on polyester. First he wipes his mouth, squeezes his eyes shut, and tries to steady his vision. Then he realizes he’s been asleep on a roll made of his own winter coat, covered in a wool blanket, and that there’s a pair of turquoise eyes looking right into his. Huh. They’re very pretty. The colour of the flames he’d been and held in the dream. But inverted: rose heart, turquoise body.

“You back, Doc?” asks a low, familiar voice.

Lio blinks, zooms out, sees that this is Galo, who’s crouched right in front of him. Nausea and bitter cold grip him. He tucks his knees up closer to his chest under the blanket. Words come slow and sloppy. “Are you watching me sleep, Galo Thymos?”

“Ha, well,” Galo says, gently, one hand coming to rest firmly on Lio’s wrist. It’s anchoring; it helps. “You’ve just had an episode.” He looks at his phone. “You were out for around three minutes.” His voice has the calm, comforting cadence of a professional. He’s not reaching for words, he’s not nervous. He’s got an empty cup in one hand. “If it’s okay with you I wanna give you some electrolytes, and Aina helped me by getting your meds out of your bag for you, but I don’t wanna make you move till you’re warmed up.”

“Fuck, sorry,” Lio says, voice hoarse, and shuts his eyes again.

“It’s okay. It’s not your fault. I’m happy to just sit here and talk at you for a while.”

Since when has Galo given off such enormous softness? The man’s default setting is a low yell.

Lio scrunches his face, blinks open. The shapes of light from the windows start resolving themselves. Galo’s hair is so, so blue. “How’d you get here?” Because he fell asleep in the lounge, he fell asleep in the—

“You’re in the Rescue, Doc,” Galo says. “You never left. Little disoriented, huh? Anything I can do to help with that?”

Now he sees the afternoon colour of the light through the windows, the pink-and-orange mess that is the virus-infected menu (“TO THE RESCUE!!”), the table that has been pushed aside to make room for Galo to crouch on, the edge of the bench that he’s lying on, the pretty blue-and-white tiles that line the floor. Deep breath. “Do me a favour. Remind me how I got here.”

“You came down, ordered your usual, we sat together, you started talking to me about last night.” A sweet smile, so different from his brash cockiness, blossoms on his face. It’s a jolt to the system. Is this the same guy who tried to foist three different horrifying holiday drinks on him on—Monday? And now it’s—wait, it was Saturday yesterday and the Rescue was closed; what does he mean, _last night?_

Galo pauses to let him absorb this, then continues: “Then you said you had an ep coming on. I went into first aid mode. And now here we are. It’s about 4 PM.”

Here. We are. Here being the specific bench on which Lio would normally sit to take his morning latte.

Galo’s holding eye contact. Steady, steady, unafraid.

“Thanks,” Lio says, and pushes up to sitting, keeping the blanket around his shoulders as he goes, though his body feels heavy and things are coming slow. “Electrolytes—if you’ve got ’em I’ll take ’em.”

Galo reaches to the displaced table behind him, cracks open a red gatorade, pours some into the empty cup he’s been holding, hands this to Lio. The drink’s cold, which counteracts the regrettable flavour choice somewhat. Lio drinks. It helps, even as he shivers his way back into his body.

“You need me to call somebody for you?” asks Galo. “Can anybody on your team help get you home?”

“They’re at home today. Or—I guess that would depend on—” Again he shakes his head, figures he can take advantage of his post-ep state to ask questions that might otherwise seem wild— “It’s Saturday, right?”

Another deep inhale, and it’s like watching a model render into just a little more detail. Around them, people are entering the Rescue, getting their drinks, and staring at the scene: one of the dining-area tables ripped away from its normal location, one man sitting in what is sure to look like a regrettable state with another man crouched attentively in front of him. Customers see this and reevaluate their itineraries, choosing not to stop in the dining area after all. They divert their routes around the mess.

But Galo is undeterred by their anxious attention. Every bit of his focus is on Lio, and it’s nearly eye-watering in its intensity. Lio thinks it’d be very good, if this were not the aftermath of an apparent minor medical emergency. One that he doesn’t remember.

And then Galo takes the sides of the emergency blanket and tucks it tighter around Lio. Then onto his knees, chin tipped up to look into Lio’s face.

“It’s Friday, Doc,” Galo says, which, no it isn’t.

No— _no_ —that would mean Kray’s deadline has already passed—it would mean— “A date, Galo.”

Galo’s cheeks go rosy. For a second he’s got an inexplicable, boyish shyness on him.

“That so, Doc? You thought about it?”

“What?” Lio asks, and frowns at Galo’s hopeful face. “Huh?”

Galo dunks his face in one palm. “Sorry. I’m being silly. You meant like the calendar. It’s, uh, it’s the eighteenth.”

“Okay,” Lio says in a breath. He recalculates. That’s yesterday. That’s Friday. But it’s _this_ Friday. It’s the Friday before Saturday. It’s Friday, backwards.

Sure. Okay. That makes sense. He nods. Nodding might make it real.

“You don’t look so good, Doc. You wanna drink some more of that for me?” Galo offers the two-thirds-full bottle of red gatorade and Lio’s pill case, the one shaped like a Space Invader. “And just in case. I don’t know your dosage or anything.”

Lio squints into the container. There are six pills in the case. There were four on Saturday—tomorrow? He takes out his normal dosage. Two ice-blue pills. 500 mg of Foresitam once a day. Too expensive for him to afford without his insurance. Maybe that’s why his elder acquaintance had to resort to meditation instead. He juggles them in his palm, feels entirely like a piece of shit, isn’t even sure if he should take them given that the ep’s over. Can’t even be sure, if it’s—Friday, whether he’s already taken his daily dosage. His heart flutters dangerously inside him.

Galo’s still knelt in front of him, soft without, Lio thinks, being overly tender. “You’re really chill about this,” Lio tells Galo, once he’s dumped the pills back into the case and clicked it shut.

Chill indeed. Galo lets his hands dangle off their wrists between his knees. “I mean, like I said, nursing school, so.”

‘Like I said’. As though Lio ought to remember.

He bites his tongue. Makes a decision. He’s not going to the hospital again for this, not for someone to just tell him nothing’s wrong then send him home with more of what he’s already taking. He clams up. He’ll go along with this until he can be sure of what’s going on.

“Makes sense,” he says, as a cover. For safety.

“Yeah.” Galo taps the stamped metal of Lio’s pill case with a fingernail. “You like video games, Doc?”

“Yeah. Video games, science fiction. Anything robots.”

“Yeah,” Galo says, his smile broadening. He winks, tips his head to one side, as though ‘robots’ is some kind of code word to start flirting. Which would normally _actually work_ on Lio, if this whole situation weren’t so fucking _weird_. “Like you said at the party.”

Lio swallows more sport drink, lets down the cup slowly. “Right, at the party.” The party he is supposed to attend on Thursday. Was supposed to attend. The party he missed.

No. The party he _did_ attend. But doesn’t remember. Because. Because he’s come back in time.

It’s the Friday before the Saturday. It’s all just hitting him.

“Yeah, at the party. When we—talked.” Galo lifts blue eyebrows, tips head to the other side. There’s too much happening right now for him to linger on the parting of his lips, on the openness of his gaze. Lio _wants_ to be here for Galo’s gentleness, for his soft gaze, for the way he’s so very big and so very kneeling on the floor, and Lio is weak, he’s _predictable_ , but for fuck’s sake, _baristas don’t date their customers_. And scientists on life-or-death deadlines shouldn’t date, period.

“Sorry I’m all weird,” Lio breathes, guilt washing over him. “I’m kind of a mess right now.”

Galo sets his hands on Lio’s knees. Grounding touch. Then his smile falls away, and, as stone, Galo goes from handsome to chillingly beautiful. “No worries, Doc. You’re not the only one.”

“Hey,” Lio says, and sets his hands on Galo’s. Like this it’s clear his fingers are ice cold. “You said you’d talk at me awhile.”

“Yeah, Doc.”

“So, talk. There’s something you’re not saying.”

Galo lets his gaze drop, stands up off the floor with a heavy, aching grunt—he’s been standing all day—and sits down again at Lio’s hip. “I—” he starts, like the thought hasn’t formed yet. “It’s Kray. Like, he’s really helped me out. Did me more than a few good turns, got me hired here, and it’s like, I thought we understood each other.” He shakes his head, eyes unfocused. “I always had the sense it wasn’t forever, I mean it’s food service, but the Rescue’s been around less than a year. And like… I thought he was interested in more than just profit.”

Lio swallows rage. “Yeah?”

“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t know him as well as I thought. I put my heart into the Rescue. To him, it’s just another investment.”

“I get it,” Lio breathes. “More than you know.”

Galo looks at him, tracks his gaze all over Lio’s face. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Lio nods. “I really do.”

Echoing the nod, Galo steadies Lio’s empty cup, still held in Lio’s fingers, and refills it with the last of the gatorade. The whole world shudders to a halt around that act of service. Around Galo’s low eyelashes, his focused gaze, his warm careful hands, his calm expression, his beautiful face. Lio thinks he could stay here like this, in this feeling, in this breathtaking moment, if only the world would cease moving too quickly around him for him to keep up with.

“Oh, hey,” Galo says, once Lio’s cup is full again. “Your phone’s going off the hook.” He passes it to Lio, who sees that the groupchat is going haywire with a series of messages that makes his ears tingle to watch them.

_where did you go boss?????  
come onnnnnn were quitting early 2 drink our sorrows away !!!  
we’re heading to the Motorcycle Club u better meet us there  
k well we’’re buying shots and were gonna injoy them w/ or w/o u so join us wenever_

Lio pats his forehead with the phone and exhales hard. Okay. Okay. Breathe.

He reviews events. He woke up on Monday morning to run his experiment, lay down on the sofa in the lab on Tuesday, had an episode or fell asleep, woke up on _Saturday_ to field threats from his project’s investor; went home, found clean laundry, headed to urgent care where he met snowfall-meditation-lady; headed back to campus, ordered dinner for an unwell Meis and Gueira, ate mediocre pizza, then fell asleep on the sofa in the lab and woke up—here, in the Rescue, on the afternoon of the Friday before.

It’s got to be the tunneler. The thing’s only supposed to be a hypodermic needle into the Cold Side. Energy moves one way through the dimensional rift, from Earth-1 to Earth-2, to the Earth on the Cold Side, and the tunneler is an effort to make that movement go two ways. Just enough to get a person across and then back again, to ask the Cold Side to seal off the rift and then return any information necessary to Earth-1. To stop people from dying here. To stop Lio’s planet being sucked into the rift and extinguished.

He can account for the Cold Side, for the dreams.

“Why _time travel_ ,” he demands in a whisper, staring out at the beautiful blue-and-white tile floor.

“Say again, Doc?” asks Galo, startling Lio so hard out of his thought process that—

—he massively jostles the cup of gatorade in his hand.

Cold red wet tips into the vee of the emergency blanket, pours all the way down Lio’s front. RIP, white button-down.

Lio just _stares_ down at his dripping self. So does Galo.

“Oh, shit,” Galo blurts out. “Oh, shit, let me get some—hang on, Doc—” And then he disappears towards the kitchen, half-tripping over his own feet in his hurry.

“Sorry,” Lio says, nonsensically, shucking the blanket, folding it, and then tugging his shirt away from where it’s sticking to him. Gross. It’s _cold_.

Galo comes back and mops at him to the sound of Lucia, currently on duty at the espresso station, cackling at him mercilessly. 

“God, Galo, please get him home,” Aina calls after him from the till. Then she’s craning her neck and raising her voice: “Not that we don’t want to take care of you, Dr Fotia, just it’d probably be less chaotic if you were, like, actually somewhere comfortable.”

“ _Red_ ,” Galo mutters at Lio’s formerly white button-down, either ignoring Aina or not hearing her. “It had to be red. Doc, I’m so sorry, this is pathetic.”

Running his hands through his hair, Lio is a disaster of mental pieces he’s failing to fit together. Probably better if he _did_ leave. “Aina’s right. I gotta get outta here.”

Galo seems to decide on something. “You live like an hour away, right? Can I take you back to mine instead? It’s just around the—fuck—” —he ducks his gaze— “—that sounded way inappropriate. I mean, like, just to rest up, and I can give you something else to wear.”

There are three competing forces acting on Lio here. One: the pull to go to his own house and rest up. Two: the push to go to the lab, to use the extra time he now has before Saturday, before Kray comes in and says _two days or you’re finished here_ , to figure out what the tunneler did before it failed catastrophically and started Lio time jumping.

Three: the force that wants him to stick to Galo. Galo who’s tucking Lio into his coat and looking over his shoulder to negotiate a shift trade with Aina in exchange for the rest of the day off.

Force number three wins out in this particular system. Lio’s too wiped to put up more than a token protest. He lets Galo lead the way, follows him out of the coffee shop and out into the winter.

“My place or yours?” Galo asks, his breath clouding in the outdoor air as he shoulders his way into his own too-loud vintage ski jacket. Lio knows he shouldn’t put hope into that dimpling face, into those open and crinkling eyes.

So he takes a risk. Leans into his own hope instead. “Yours, if that’s okay with you.” It’s nearer by. He can just stop in, then head back to campus to work. No problem.

Galo’s face cracks into a sideways grin. Cars whoosh past, their tires noisy as they run through the slush on the road. Tipping his head to one side, hands in his pockets, Galo offers the crook of his elbow.

Lio doesn’t need the support. But he leans into it. He leans into Galo, into his warmth, and lets him lead the way.

***

“A bunch of the Rescuers live here so just, like, don’t be surprised if you see some familiar faces walking around. If you see Remi in nothing but a bathrobe you can call him out on it.” Galo’s walking Lio up a narrow, winding staircase in the enormous, ancient house a ten-minute walk from the Science Complex. It’s in the student part of town, so all the houses here are some flavour of not-code-compliant, but the exteriors are painted in any of a thousand bright colours. Welcome beacons.

Galo’s room is a steeple-ceilinged dozen square metres taking up one side of the drafty attic. Windows straight ahead, a closet to their right. Beside the door they enter through, there’s another, closed door leading to some other room. The bedroom proper is a chaos of primary colours. Messy bed to the left, under the slanted part of the roof; shelves to the right.

Lio doesn’t really notice the messy parts of the room, which Galo hurries to tidy behind him. He’s magnetized straight to the skinny table under the window, because there’s a mecha kit sitting on it, still in the plastic, just waiting to be opened up and assembled. He picks it up, examines it, his thumb skating along the model’s name and number. It’s a Revival model—an inexpensive kit, but high on the nostalgia factor for fans of vintage mechas. Lio’s heart leaps to his throat. Recognition.

“So you’re _really_ into robots, then,” Lio breathes, one side of his mouth lifting, his heart buoying him up a bit. “Not just a little.”

Galo clicks his closet shut on the basket of laundry he’s relocated from the bed. “Ah, yeah. I keep all my models behind door number two. Nobody else wanted the attic. I got extra space in exchange for it being cold as butts up here in the winter. Pretty good trade.” He raises a blue eyebrow. “Why, did you think I was some kind of fake nerd boy?”

“That’s not it,” Lio says, caught. “Not really, no? I mean, model building is kind of a quiet hobby. You don’t give off a nerd vibe so much as a jock vibe.” He traces a finger along one edge of the kit, where the robot’s posing grandiosely. It’ll look so nice when it’s complete. “Serves me right for assuming.”

Galo guffaws, pointing his laugh at the ceiling. “Doc, this isn’t _high school_. It’s not jocks versus goths or whatever. We can like what we want.”

“Ah, so you think of me as a goth and not a nerd. Interesting taxonomical choice.”

“I have no idea what that means, but definitely goth,” Galo says, scanning Lio head to toe and landing on Lio’s shirt where his winter coat is half open. “With the red you’re giving off like, office vampire vibes.”

Oh, right. The wet patch is warm with body heat now, which is why Lio’s forgotten about it until now, but opening his coat he finds it’s still very much there. Disgusting. “Yeah, I guess that’s why I’m here, so—”

“Right, yeah.” From the closet Galo extracts a black Rescue t-shirt, which he sniffs and shrugs at, and a pair of gray sweats. He piles these together, holds them out on his arm.

“Just in case your pants got mangled too,” he says, of the sweats, and shakes his head. “God, and you were dressed so nice, too.”

“Hah. It’s no big deal. Bigger fish to fry. World’s ending, my job to help save it, et cetera.” He the Revival kit back down on the table, lets his fingers drift around the robot’s outline, and accepts the clothes from Galo’s arms.

“Still, though, Doc, no harm in taking care of yourself along the way. Wanna rinse off?” Lio nods gratefully. Better in a house than at the university rec centre, which Lio avoids at all costs after 5 pm because of how busy it gets. “No problem. Here—” Galo flicks a towel up from a stack on the floor of his closet as he goes, turning on his own axis in a circle before leading the way downstairs. “Don’t think you’ll have any competition for the shower right now, ha. I mean, to be fair, it’s not like I have _everybody’s_ schedules memorized—Lucia’s on some weird-ass octomester schedule—right here.”

They stop outside the bathroom door. It’s cramped, with a lopsided unit in one corner groaning under a mountain of cosmetics, soaps, creams, and loofahs. There’s a fuzzy bathmat with blood-spattered footprints on it (“that’s Aina’s, she’s into horror,” Galo explains).

Galo introduces Lio to the finicky faucet, hands him body wash ( _Dove... for MEN_ ), and backs out. Lio then introduces himself to the hottest stream of water he can get. The water pressure’s _really_ good here.

He stares up into the calcium-flecked shower head. Sees no augury there to explain what’s happening to him. First Tuesday. Then Saturday. Now Friday. He hopes for shower thoughts, hopes the bliss of the moment will inspire his neurons to find some heretofore unfound path, then remembers that water bills exist. He closes his eyes, turns up the heat a millimetre hotter, lingers a moment longer than he should. Shuts off the stream. It’s cold again.

When he’s done towelling off, Lio finds that his work pants are unstained. Still. He puts on both the tee and the sweats anyway. It’s cozier that way.

***

When he re-enters Galo’s suddenly much tidier room with his clothes slung over one arm, Galo, seated on the bed checking his phone in the lamplight with the sun setting outside the window, looks him over head to toe and drops his jaw open. He doesn’t even bother to hide his interest. This is a grown adult man shamelessly checking out another grown adult man who is wearing his clothes.

Okay, cool. So that’s Aina’s ocean-sized crush concept thoroughly confirmed.

Maybe this isn’t the time for it. He should be in the lab, figuring out how the tunneler could have gotten him time travelling. He should be dragging Meis and Gueira out of party mode and back to the observation room while he runs tests. He should be running model after model on the data he does have and trying to figure out what’s happening to him.

But the floorboards are cool under Lio’s feet. And Galo’s mouth is open, his gaze undisguised and hungry, and he looks relaxed and incredibly beautiful in the low, warm light.

So Lio decides to test something out. It’s the experimentalist in him. He can’t help it.

“It’s a bit big on me,” he says, and plucks at the shirt’s hem.

Galo takes in a sharp breath, nods and nods, lets his gaze drift down to Lio’s ankles where he’s had to cuff the sweatpants. “Looks good, though. I mean, like, comfortable.” Drags his gaze back up, looks up at Lio as he steps closer like Lio’s caught his attention on a fishing line.

Lio resists a shiver. Okay! Test over! Back to feeling weird and awkward! “You don’t normally let your customers wear your clothes when they spill stuff on themselves, right? Tell me this is an unusual circumstance.”

Immediately Galo straightens up in the spine. “Uh, yeah. Well, and I’ve sure as hell never taken anybody home who needed first aid, but…” He scritches the back of his neck. “After the party, I kind of figured we weren’t just acquaintances anymore.”

 _What the time travelling hell happened at that party,_ Lio burns to ask, but what an impossible question. He’s playing the role of a Lio who at least sort of knows what’s happening. It’s too late to admit now that he doesn’t know what the fuck is going on.

But it _is_ , he figures, germane to the conversation for him to ask: “What do you figure we are, then? If acquaintances we are not.”

It’s sunset outside, but Galo’s the noonday sun. “At least friends.” Then he goes serious again: “Like, second date would obviously be rad. But I get that you need to finish the project, and now I honestly need time too, to deal with the Rescue scrambling. I’m not gonna push.” A smile dances back onto his face. “So it’s cool by me if we take our time.”

An off-balance breath. _Second_ date? Lio steps closer. Nearly knee to knee now. “We really had a connection at that party, huh.”

Galo leans forward, inordinately pleased. “We really did.”

“Cool.”

Cool, yes. But it’s awkward as fuck. They’re not actually on the same page. He does not remember a Thursday night party. Lio’s insides squirm. In deciding to clam up about the trouble he’s in, well, he’s made the decision to lie, and that’s—

Galo, blessèd Galo, maybe notices Lio’s exhaustion and scoots toward the foot of the bed. “If you wanna lie down a bit, go for it, I’ll just hang out. Won’t be loud, promise.”

Lio laughs through his nose. “Only when you’re slinging espresso.”

“Well, definitely, but honestly, get me talking about coffee, or any of that stuff—” —Galo jabs a thumb toward the kit— “—and I’ll start steadily increasing in volume till you have to tell me to turn it down. Which you should totally feel free to. I don’t have volume control when it comes to stuff I enjoy.”

“Hmm,” Lio says, raising his eyebrows, absolutely not thinking of any other circumstance under which a person might become uncontrollably loud, he is not thinking any thoughts at all, he has ejected all thoughts from the spaceship of his mind and into the blackness of space, oh _fuck_ , _fuck_ , Galo is going to kill him, this man is going to kill him, Lio is sitting on the bed, _why is he sitting on the bed_ , he scoots back towards the pillow to curl up with his legs against his chest in the name of self-defense.

Oh fuck, he needs to say something. Otherwise Galo’s going to look at him like he’s concerned again, and his heart can’t take it. “Seems to me it’s just part of who you are.”

Galo puts a hand into the hair at the root of his spiked-up hair. “Yeah. I guess people get used to it eventually. It works at work, anyway. Being loud means it’s easier for me to make people feel welcome when they come into the shop.” His face drops into that arrestingly beautiful seriousness again. “Kinda worried after today that it won’t last, though.”

“Tell me about that,” Lio says, wrapping arms around his knees. “You said back at the Rescue that you were worried Kray only sees it as an investment.”

With a sigh like he’s blowing out a fire, Galo stands up from the cramped right-under-the-roof end of the bed and grabs the chair from the table, then wheels it over so that he can sit beside Lio. “Well, I only really heard it second-hand from Remi and Ignis, but apparently we need to start pulling in more profits in the new year or we’ll lose the space. Which incidentally Kray owns. It feels like kind of a trap: he can def afford to keep us, so he’s obviously looking for reasons not to. And the ways to increase profits are shitty, too. Like, stop paying our staff a living wage? Compromise on our suppliers? I thought Lucia’s marketing idea was pretty cool until we all realized that taking over other people’s systems is kind of aggressive; that doesn’t really work either.”

Throughout all of this Galo body undergoes a radical transformation: his posture sinks itself, his spine curves over, his head drops. Lines come into his face where there shouldn’t be any. His back to the window, shadows find their way in under the bones of his face all the more easily.

Lio realizes with a jolt to his liver that he would do just about anything to see the sun back in that face.

“I don’t know if this helps to know,” he says, voice low, “but when I said I get it, I meant it. Kray’s going to take our project away if my team doesn’t find a way to do the impossible for him. So like—” —he extends a fist across his body, hoping for a bump— “—solidarity.”

Galo breathes a half laugh and knocks his knuckles against Lio’s. In the warm, low light he spends a long moment looking at Lio with—Galo’s so fucking easy to read, _help_ —undisguised desire. But he moves in the opposite direction. Stands. Now it’s Lio’s turn to follow Galo helplessly with his gaze. “If you wanna keep resting here, I can go make us something to eat, if that helps you post-ep?”

It does, it genuinely does, and Lio has no way of knowing when he last ate. “I can’t impose on you,” he says, because it’s getting darker outside, and Galo probably makes a third the money he makes, and Lio has a responsibility to his team, to his fellow rifties, to the goddamn world. He swings his legs off the bed. It hits like a punch to one of his lungs. Still. “I’ve got a machine to get back to.”

Galo says: “First of all, didn’t we just say we’re friends? You’re not imposing. Second of all, I’m just reheating a few things, it’s not a big deal. Third of all, I don’t think that machine’ll get any better if you’re strung out and starving.” He flips his phone off the inverted milk crates that serve him as a nightstand and swipes around a bit. “Can I give you my number?” He waves the phone at Lio. “That way you can text me downstairs if you need something.”

Again that twinkle of hope in his eyes. That warm, uncovered eagerness. Something inside Lio wants to turn toward it like a heliotrope.

So he concedes to the offer, lifts up onto his elbow, reaches for his bag on the floor where he left it, grabs his phone. Opens up his messaging app, pops his signature dragon emoji into the text field, taps out Galo’s phone number when it’s given to him; sends his text, gets Galo’s rooster in return. Galo explains that gallo means rooster in Spanish. They exchange grins.

“Thanks,” Lio says. “Seriously. Thanks. I owe you one.”

Galo shakes his head. “Forget it, Doc, it’s not some kind of trade. You’re my friend, so I treat you good and you treat me good. I don’t have blood family, right, so my friends are my family. You understand.”

Lio’s mouth drops open. This is some Meis and Gueira level conversation. And it’s _getting_ to him. Making him all soft and weak, and. “Uh, yeah. I really, really do.”

“We gotta work together to make sure we all get what we need.” Now at the door, Galo points at him. “I’m making us food, we’ll both get to eat it, we both benefit. You rest up. If you wanna owe me, do me a favour and rest up, yeah?” Then he disappears.

Lio goes slowly down onto the bed on his side. Looks at the dragon and the rooster, together in the messaging app. Lets his heart hammer and hammer. Lets those hammerbeats reshape him, maybe, lets them open him up. Just a little, little bit. Maybe it’s okay to let some of the sunlight in.

***

Lio wants to fall asleep, but there’s a thing inside him, a worry like a hair caught in his eye, that says if he does, he’ll lose his place in time again—that he’ll be yanked out of this comfortable place where a very beautiful man looks at him without reservation and brings him food. If he sleeps, he might dream again. And then who knows—back in time, before all this started happening? Forward in time, when Kray’s forcibly handed off the project to some other team who’ll ruin it with their lack of knowledge? If he could model what the tunneler’s actually doing to spacetime, he could get an idea of where this thing begins and ends. And maybe of where he’ll end up next.

He doesn’t fall asleep. He doesn’t. He doesn’t warm more than half of his body under Galo’s blankets, instead permitting the chilly attic draft to nibble at his ankles and keep him awake. Instead of sleeping he watches the snow drift down outside the window, lit by a nearby streetlamp against the darkness of the sky. He thinks of the elder in the hospital, hopes that she made it back home okay. That she eventually got the care she needed instead of being summarily dismissed by a medical professional with an overfull docket.

Twitter keeps him awake, in a manner of speaking. Not in a good way. It comes as a shock his nervous system isn’t really well enough to take, and he bolts upright, nearly braining himself on the slanted ceiling overhead.

Heris Ardebit, PhD  
@prof_heris   
A bittersweet announcement. Despite losing our colleague Thyma so suddenly to complications of rift syndrome earlier this week, our parallel resonance emitter is almost ready to launch. We’re planning to run it early next week after Thyma’s memorial ceremony. 10:23 AM - 17 December 2020  10.5k  93.2k 

Dr Gaski has had it up to HERE  
@unflavoredcarbon   
@prof_heris So glad to here . . . the PRE is much safer than the other model’s being developed round the world… a testament to Dr Promeths legacy & Thymas. RIP 10:25 AM - 17 December 2020  130  78 

Aina says organize 🎶 🏳️⚧️ 🌺  
@auto___pilot   
@prof_heris so proud of you sis and hurting real bad for you too 💜 I'll call you after work 10:28 AM - 17 December 2020  1 

He doesn’t have it in him to feel jealous, or anxious, or anything except resentful of Kray. He’s happy for Heris. And sad for her, too. Bittersweet indeed.

So in blazing, tiny, targeted defiance he leaves Heris a reply.

Lio Fotia  
@dr_fotia   
@prof_heris Heris, I’m so sorry. I remember Thyma being so incredibly welcoming when our teams worked together in the past. She’ll be sorely missed. Congrats on the upcoming test and fingers crossed for a good result. 5:15 PM - 18 December 2020  12 

The snow streaks faster now across the dark pane of the window, Lio’s phone screen brighter than before against the blue-striped blanket on Galo’s bed. His borrowed clothes are light on him. Over on the chair, his sink-rinsed shirt airs slowly, the sleeves moving every so often in the everpresent draft. He can almost feel the world getting sleepier around him.

He lies back down on his side, in Galo’s bed that he guesses must smell like Galo. He carefully does not fall asleep. Instead he sketches calculations in his head. What if the needle of the tunneler rippled the spacetime fluid around it just so when it pierced through? What if he’s riding those ripples now, sewing through them at uncommon angles? In the multidimensional space of his mind he models the possibilities at the edge of sleep, one ankle cooling in the draft.

When finally he remembers that the woman he saw turn into ash was Thyma herself, well, he is more awake than ever.

***

Galo’s footsteps up the creaking stairs bring him back to reality right quick. There’s a bit of a scramble to tidy the long table under the window; then Galo grabs a wooden chair for himself from behind door number two. Dinner is an incredible homemade mac ’n’ cheese that looks fresh out from under the broiler. It’s creamy underneath but marbled and browned on top, with lots of crunchy side bits and a layer of crispy breadcrumbs. There’s also a side of kale salad dressed in something sweet. Apricot and caramelized onion vinaigrette, Galo explains.

Then he says, “Eat up,” and laughs when Lio looks up at him with watery, grateful eyes.

“Thank you,” Lio says, and does.

The meal’s absolutely delicious and he’s starving. Only when he’s already finished the salad does he recall that it will show up again, not in a pleasant way, on Saturday morning. That doesn’t deter him from absolutely downing the rest of the mac ‘n’ cheese. There’s no way for him to know when his last meal was. His next one won’t be until—probably until the dumplings he’ll eat Saturday midday.

“You’re so focused. You’d think you’d never eaten before in your life,” Galo observes, and gives Lio some extra salad and half his remaining mac ’n’ cheese, right off his plate. “I better cook for you more often.” Then he sucks on his fork because he is a _criminal_.

Galo got to eye him shamelessly earlier, so Lio lets himself be daring and take an eyeful of his own. Then back to the food. “This is me showing one card too many, but I can’t remember the last time I ate a home-cooked meal that wasn’t either made by me and therefore one of the only five recipes I can cook; or made by Meis and Gueira, my labmates, and therefore experimental.”

“Hell, nothing wrong with being experimental,” says Galo. “That’s half the fun.”

“Sure, if you’re good at cooking, but they only _think_ they’re good cooks.”

“Aha, like they’re trying things out but they don’t have their basics down?”

“ _Exactly_.” Lio waves his fork at Galo’s tipping plate— “You can’t give me more. Stop that.”

“You’re almost finished yours! You’re eating like you haven’t eaten in days!”

“Then get us something else, for crying out loud!”

“I just got here, I’m not going all the way downstairs till I have dishes to bring down! It’s a trek! I’m not leaving my guest all alone half the time he’s here!”

“I will not come into your house and eat all your gourmet mac ’n’ cheese which you made with your own two hands, Galo Thymos, you deserve to eat this more than I do, you actually _did the work of cooking it_ —”

“Yeah, well, it’s mine, I made it, and I make the decisions about who gets to eat it, and I’m deciding that you get to eat the rest, so _eat_ —”

***

They both concede eventually. Lio eats the remaining mac ‘n’ cheese, and Galo obtains more food for them. A bowl of strawberries, and something he calls grapefruit bars—pink grapefruit curd on a shortbread crust, dusted with icing sugar that looks a lot like the snow trekking steadily down outside.

“Let me guess, these are homemade too,” Lio says, playing at being accusatory, but they’re so good (bursting with tartness to contrast with the sweet) that he lets his resolve crumble like the crust and surrenders to a second serving.

Galo’s teeth are crooked on the bottom in front and for a flash of a second, Lio thinks about what it’d be like to put his tongue along the place where they overlap. Galo is _speaking_. Time to _listen_. He is _smiling while he does it_. This is _good_. “Don’t get me wrong, I like fast food as much as the next guy. I just really like making things with my hands. Especially a good meal after a long day. It forces me to focus, quiets me down for a bit, and the results are good like, ninety five percent of the time.”

Then Galo has the _audacity_ to suck icing sugar off the pad of his thumb while making eye contact, and Lio nearly combusts on the spot.

“That’s,” he says, “great,” he says, “and like,” he continues, “really fits you as a person,” he concludes, quite shoddily. He is _Lio Fotia_. He is supposed to be _effortlessly cool_. He is _Twitter famous because of it_. According to the greater Internet he is apparently an _IRL Ian Malcolm_.

“I mean, maybe,” Galo says, eyes crinkling in his amusement. “But like, everybody can cook. Just gotta practice, and have some time to do it in, and have the right ingredients of course. Not everybody has all of those. You’ve been real busy, sounds like. Can hardly blame you.”

“Yeah. I work a lot of hours. Take work home. Dream about it.” Lio exhales, lets the last chunk of grapefruit bar melt on his tongue, lets his fork clink on the plate. “It’s fine. It comes with the territory.”

The lamplight hits Galo’s skin in warm shades. His eyes look dark, serious. “Is it? Fine, I mean.”

Lio shrugs. “I’ve been working my ass off since I can remember to get this dimensional rift closed. More and more people die the longer it stays open.” He thinks about Thyma, about ashes like snow on an unseen breeze. About what it must be like to become thousands of pieces eddied up into nothingness. When he can fall asleep, he thinks about it: about what it must be like to get stuck in an episode and die of endogenous hypothermia. About what it must be like to freeze to death from the inside out, anywhere at all, because your life essence is feeding someone’s pyromania one universe over.

It could happen to any of his friends, to Meis and Gueira, to the elder in the urgent care waiting room, to himself. It could happen to him tonight.

“It’s _got_ to be fine,” he says, because too many have been lost already and this _can_ be fixed, if only he can work fast enough to fix it.

Galo reaches for his gaze, holds it. “But you do better work when you’re not totally strung out and overtaxed, right?”

“This week’s—been an exception. Normally I’m arguably not overtaxed.”

“‘Arguably’ doesn’t give me much hope, Doc.”

“Yeah,” Lio says, and tries to find some augury in the shortbread crumbs on his plate, unsure what he’s supposed to say next.

Galo huffs a laugh all soft and starts stacking their plates. “You want anything else while I’m downstairs? Water? Advil? Cup of tea?”

 _Just to learn more about you,_ Lio thinks wildly. But time’s burning away. Ashes into the air. “I have to get back to the lab soon. Back to my machine.”

If Galo looks disappointed, he doesn’t confirm in words, just nods and says, “Yeah, I get it, totally. ‘Kay, then I’ll be back in a minute. Hang tight.”

And so when Galo leaves the room with their dishes, Lio settles back down onto the flat of the bed for a last few horizontal minutes and stares up at the slanted ceiling, where Galo’s pinned up all manner of images—his favourite robots, some art Lio can’t identify, photos of him and Aina on vacation, or of himself looking much younger, posing with Kray Foresight with confetti floating down around them. That last one he dusts his fingers at the edge of. Seeing Kray so media-ready, so posedly _Kray_ alongside Galo’s genuine joy feels like a lie he ought to unpick with scalpel and awl.

But then there’s also that doubt, that hair caught in his eye: did we forget that we’re being dishonest with Galo? That we don’t know him as well as he knows us? That we’re pretending to be a Lio who doesn’t exist yet?

 _Fuck_ —he’s never going to be able to explain his way out of this one. Better to just head back to the lab and work on the problem until that stresses him out more than this does.

***

Galo gives him a grocery bag for his gatorade-ruined shirt and walks them down the narrow stairs. On the stoop, he goes all hesitant again. Sticks his hands in the pockets of his red hoodie and curls in, as if to make himself smaller. His breath puffs in the winter air. Lio can picture snowflakes sticking to his pretty blue eyelashes like pale-coloured stars.

“Hey, so,” Galo says thickly, “think about that date, huh? Once everything kind of—” —he waves a hand in the air— “—blows over, you know, it’d be cool to like. Get to know you better.”

“Once everything blows over, yeah.” Lio doesn’t know. He _wants_ to. But it’s possible he won’t be able to stand up against too much ongoing goodheartedness.

“Yeah.” And Galo shifts closer, eyes glittering in the light from the streetlamps.

“Thanks,” Lio says, cutting himself off before he can say _for taking care of me_ , because that’s delving too deep into a sweetness belongs to a Lio who should be here instead of him. Thursday night’s Lio. “Thank you,” he says again, and “Thanks,” and “Have a good rest of your night,” and then he heads down the stoop, digging the chunky soles of his boots into each thick coating of crackling snow so as not to slip. Back to the lab! Back to do some more science.

Galo yells after him, too loudly, “YOU TOO!”

Lio finishes crossing the street, then turns around. There’s Galo, in hoodie and slippers on the stoop, arms tight around him. “Go inside! It’s freezing!”

With a shake of the head and a wave of the arm, Galo denies him. “The heat of my burning heart is keeping me warm!”

“Ridiculous,” Lio calls.

“Plus the rear view is top quality!”

Lio looks down at himself. “I’m wearing oversized sweatpants and the biggest coat I own.”

“Yeah!” Galo crows. “Winter safety is sexy!”

“Tell that to your toes before they get frostbite,” Lio yells through the falling snow, and half-turns. “Have a good night.”

“Good luck on the project,” Galo calls after his back, and Lio knows, knows now, that that means _come back to me soon_ , and that thought keeps him warm from the inside out for the rest of the walk back to campus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **first aid** : the chapter opens on a scene where Galo is going some first aid on Lio after an unexpected episode. that portion of things more or less ends around "Chill indeed. Galo lets his hands dangle off their wrists between his knees."
> 
>  **death mention:** if you aren't in a position to read about death right now, please stop reading after "It comes as a shock his nervous system isn’t really well enough to take, and he bolts upright, nearly braining himself on the slanted ceiling overhead." you can pick up reading again at "Galo’s footsteps up the creaking stairs bring him back to reality right quick." the death is not onscreen and if you watched _Promare_ all the way through it'll be familiar, but yeah, just in case. basically, a distant colleague named Thyma, who has rift syndrome and works for Heris Ardebit's team (a.k.a. the Hestians), has died, which causes Lio to grieve as you might grieve an acquaintance.
> 
>  **food, nonvegan:** the food talk begins at "Galo’s footsteps up the creaking stairs bring him back to reality right quick." and continues until around "'Yeah. I work a lot of hours. Take work home. Dream about it.'"
> 
> those cover the CWs I know people ask for most commonly, but if you have any that it would mean a lot to you that I tag, please let me know!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haha it took me forever to finish this and put it up!! @ me reminding myself that (1) it's fanfic, it's just for fun and (2) IT'S FANFIC, IT'S JUST FOR FUN
> 
> content notes in the endnotes as always! this chapter gets intense in places but then it gets cute again! welcome to the rollercoaster!
> 
> EDITED TO ADD: this story has a happy ending, I promise

Back in the empty observation room—still devoid of Meis and Gueira, who, if his messaging app has the right of it, are at the Motorcycle Club slamming happy hour drinks—Lio sits at the laptop with the modelling software on it and perches his chin on his hand. Down below, the pale housing of the tunneler’s cabinets and consoles reflects the fluorescents, too bright for this time of day in winter.

Of course, he realizes that when he found the data clean on Saturday, that _he_ must have been the one to finish cleaning it. Today. On Friday. Most of the cleanup is done, but the data itself is still coated in an even sprinkling of bizarre artifacts. He utters a low scream into the surface of the table, then gets to work.

As he works he plays some music, but the automatic nature of the work leaves his mind plenty of room to wander through the broader question of time travel. His work on the dimensional rift did include study of time, sure, but he never worked on questions like _what are the things you personally should do if you are stuck in a loop?_ The questions he’s worked on have been physical and metaphysical, if anything, not so much ethical. More _then what_ , less _should_. He certainly never studied questions like: if he doesn’t fix this, will it keep happening? Is this jump-when-you-sleep phenomenon just... what he’ll be doing for the rest of his life until he jumps to his deathbed?

The laptop hums along in front of him. He drums his fingers on the table.

If he’s thinking about the tunneler, well, he’s certainly established a connection. He can go to the Cold Side and return just fine. It’s less clear whether it’s possible to get a message across to someone else.

Well. No reason not to attempt a test. That’s the spirit of the experimentalist, isn’t it? To test a hypothesis, even if there’s no one else there to confirm his findings? At any rate it’s a good excuse for him to leave the observation room, grab the blanket from his office, and head for his old friend, Mr Sofa, in the lounge. Even after taking such a perfect break with Galo, the episode after episode thing, with no clarity on when he’s actually sleeping if at all, is wearing him down.

Snug in his office blanket, Lio thinks about Galo’s model mecha, waiting in its box; about the collection he keeps behind door number two, about what it’d take to get him to show it to Lio; about the mac ’n’ cheese; about the salad of massaged kale; about Galo’s first aid bedside manner, so confident and at ease; about the smell of Galo’s boyish body wash; about the way he lives with his friends as though they’re family. About the brightness of his smile. About the seriousness he gets when he’s talking about close-to-home issues. About how quiet he gets when they’re one-on-one.

When Lio slips into sleep, he’s on to thinking about what Galo’s hair must feel like when it’s down, not in its workday spikes. Soft between his fingers, he thinks.

***

But it doesn’t happen right. Something’s not right.

He’s not pulled into the body in the right direction. At first, when the spark lights, he’s burning perfect and clean. But the body’s held fast. Hands are opening and closing, arms are restrained. Thick lines of barbed wire have strapped him in. His chest and arms are bare, and he’s burning, clean and green, but it’s involuntary.

The body clenches its jaws and tries to send him back. It pushes at Lio-the-fire. But he’s burning, and so he is here, and so he will remain until the burning stops.

 _Stop pushing_ , he tells the body. _Let me talk to you. I need you to get a message—_

“Too late,” the body squeezes out, in his own voice, as the pull on Lio himself intensifies and he burns harder. There is pain, Lio thinks. Oh—hey—yeah, actually, there’s agony, growing every second, only it was so enormous and all-encompassing he hadn’t noticed it on entry. “It’s—too—late. The gate—”

 _Tell them to shut the dimensional rift,_ Lio says. _Tell your people to close it. It has to be sealed._

Every muscle is taut to the point of tearing.

 _Wish I could help,_ says a thought-shape in the exact shape of his own.

 _If you don’t tell them to close it, my world will be destroyed,_ Lio tells him. The other him.

 _Get in line,_ the other him thinks.

The agony having reached a peak, now it changes. Lio looks over at his left hand. His fingers begin to dissolve into upward ashes. He screams through it because he has to.

Just an echo. All around him, now, there are people screaming, the firmament this place is built on.

An intercom: “Liftoff imminent. All recorders and oscillographs are set. Pressurization complete. T-30 and counting. Mark, 30 seconds.”

 _What does that mean,_ Lio thinks, scrambling wildly, as his own fingers burn away, from knuckle to knuckle, bone and all. _Are we on a spaceship? Oh, fuck—_ It’s got the other hand now. He’s turning a flat grey. He’s turning to ash. He’s rising into the air on a current.

He could be snowflakes. He could be the downward falling of snow, worked through by an eddy, gusting toward a destination of his choosing, but here, no, this is death. This is the ultimate.

“It means,” says Lio, the other Lio, “that it’s all been in vain.”

The screaming cavern rumbles around them. Subsonic booms signal something enormous. At the heart of it a countdown.

 _What does this mean_ , Lio begs again, as he burns cleanly and perfectly in a way that is too much for the body to bear. The body. _His_ body. His body—oh, fuck, his _hands_ —

“It means _get out of here._ They’re dying. He’s already dead.” An image plays, forever to be speared inside him: Galo, torn through by some twisted shard. “They’re all going to die. It’s over.” 

The other Lio tries shunting him away again.

“Three… two… one. Gate crossing imminent. Lock down for dimensional transit,” says the voice on the intercom.

“I thought—hah—I really thought we had a chance,” Lio whispers.

Then silence.

There is uplift. Together they gasp involuntarily, hanging desperately on to life. Again involuntarily they throw their head back, as though keeping their muscles taut in these barbed-wire restraints will protect them.

Above them, Lio can see the shimmering stars.

 _No,_ Lio thinks, unsure if it’s his thought or _his_ thought; and then gravity does something enormous inside their body, folds them, changes them; and just as the stars begin to change, just the intercom blares triumphantly, “Dimensional transit successful,” something snaps.

There is a flash of light, and he is catapulted into unconsciousness before he can even register what’s happening. This is nothing like falling snow. This is the report of a nuclear weapon.

***

When he wakes up, gasping and screaming with his spine and organs iced through, he’s still in the lounge. There is, he thinks, daylight. Meis and Gueira are blocking it out because they’re running for him from the end of the lounge where not long ago Lio ate a bad pizza.

Gueira’s reaching for his phone. “Hey, boss, we’re here. We’re both here.”

“What day is it,” Lio asks immediately, grabbing Meis’s arm where he’s crouching beside him. It feels like he’ll never catch his breath again, it’s so cold. Fuck. His _hands_ — _his hands_ — “Meis. What _day_ is it. I need a date.”

“It’s Wednesday the sixteenth. Afternoon,” Meis says easily, and then hisses, and gently places his hand over Lio’s. “Hey, boss, that hurts, can you ease up?”

“Yeah, yes—” Okay. Wednesday—afternoon. He breathes out, and only then unclaws his hand from Meis’s shoulder. “Sorry.”

“I get it,” Meis says, but he’s lifting the neck of his shirt to check his skin. His wince tells Lio his apology is warranted.

Gueira’s sitting on the edge of the sofa beside Lio’s knee. “You do a time jump, boss?”

Rapidly Lio blink-blinks up at him. “You know about that?”

“Yeah,” Gueira says. “You told us yesterday.” Then he looks at Meis; they exchange quick glances. “Well. You _will_ tell us yesterday. From your standpoint. I think. There’s a whole diagram.”

Meis half-grins at him. “I’d say something like, you should’ve told us the minute it started happening, but I think that’s Saturday for you. Which obviously hasn’t happened for us yet.” He tips his chin up. “What’d you see on the other side? Oh, shit—”

“Hey, boss, hey, it’s okay, we’ve got you.” Gueira’s patting his pockets, comes out with the remains of a crumpled packet of tissues, shakes out the last one, crumples the plastic and tosses it onto the table. Offers it, but Lio can’t make sense of the tissue or of his hands or the tears pouring down his face, so Gueira ends up dabbing his cheeks. “Fuck, Meis, will you—”

There’s a bit of gentle scrambling. A bit of care. The circle of Gueira’s arm is the most important part. Lio looks into his palms and sees the lines of his own skin, but just a couple of minutes ago he was burning away. Bones and all. Bones and all.

There’s a blanket around him. A warm cup of something in his hands. The Space Invader pill case. The shuffling of grad student feet as they come in. Hands rubbing at his upper arms. He just wants to sleep. He just wants to _sleep_. He’s so tired. He’s so cold.

Eventually, with the help of Gueira and Meis’s cozy, soothing banter, he gets himself together. The party hasn’t happened yet; the tunneler is broken; the meeting with Kray is still on the horizon. All this means there’s still time to plan ahead, and still time to work on the tunneler. To get it working before Friday. To—change things.

He’s just seen the world turn into ashes and screaming, after all. That can’t be what it’s all leading to. That _can’t_.

Meis is gentle where he’s crouched. “That’s like the fourth ep you’ve had in three days, boss. You sure you don’t want to go to the doctor?”

“I just want to get the tunneler fixed,” Lio croaks. “We have to get through properly. You said something about a diagram.”

“Oh, yeah,” says Gueira, and looks at Meis again as he stands.

Lio catches the weird look they exchange. “What?—I said something weird.”

Meis half-snorts, not very hard. “You were just saying an hour ago, fuck it, that you didn’t think it mattered. That we wouldn’t get it done in time for our meeting with Kray on Friday.” He takes Lio’s hand, rubs his thumb in circles on the back of it. “Just a bit of emotional whiplash from watching you travel.”

Emotional whiplash? Yeah, that’s one way of putting it. Lio’s exhausted and his nerves are fried. He puts his cheek on the cushion, angrily; how dare his body not be up to dimensional travel every, what, roughly every twelve hours or so. He could avoid it, if only he didn’t sleep, but that seems like an impossible ask. His eyelids are weighty even now.

He inhales shakily, tears still in his sinuses. “Emotional whiplash. You have _no idea_.”

Hand continuing its gentle transit, Meis asks, “What did you see on the other side, boss?” 

Lio blinks, blinks, blinks again. “I saw myself tied down in a spaceship,” he says. “And I heard hundreds of people screaming all at once in agony.” He pulls his knees up to his chest. “A dimensional gate opened and the spaceship passed through, and then I snapped back to here. Their world was dying—I mean the Cold Side. I’d, or he’d, lost someone.” Galo, specifically. He can’t erase the memory that doesn’t belong to him. A dead-eyed man, ripped open from chest to navel, his soft mouth slack.

Tears well up again. Lio half-pushes himself back up to sitting. “I need to see him.”

“Hey, whoa now. Siddown, boss. Take a breath.” Meis’s hand is at his chest now. Pressing. How can he be _steady_ —how can he be so _calm_ —

“Let me go,” Lio hisses, mustering as much calm as he can manage. “I can’t just wait here for an entire world to die and take ours with it.”

“I’m not saying don’t work on the problem, I’m saying you won’t help anybody if you’re falling apart.” Meis opens his fingers on Lio’s chest, almost with an intention to rub warmth into him. 

Too exhausted to grab Meis by the wrist and throw his hand away, Lio sighs angrily, but whatever poison barb is about to leave his mouth doesn’t get out fast enough to beat Gueira, who’s striding back in carrying a quartered sheet of notebook paper, which he hands over to Lio.

Lio lays the sheet open in his lap. It’s been divided into a calendar week. Monday through Sunday. There’s some colour-coding going on. Some sections of the calendar are empty. Friday morning has a big square with a question mark on it. Sunday’s a big block of question marks, too. It’s scrawled over beyond belief in Lio’s very own totally illegible handwriting. He’d never make it as a barista, writing names on cups.

“Explain,” he says, pointing at a scrawl of purple ballpoint along the bottom, connected to the calendar days by various lines.

Gueira sits on the sofa beside him, peers over his shoulder. He makes a noise of total understanding, then shakes his head. “No idea, boss.”

“You were talking about sorting the jumps to see where you needed to go, and where you _could_ go,” says Meis, curling a finger over the top of the page. “We tried talking it through with you, but you weren’t in much of a listening mood, basically told us we were already fucked.”

 _Prison breakout_ , says the purple pen. _Thyma dies_. _Volcano fight, subzero bullet,_ says another scrawl. 

Then _Spaceship, end of world_ , and, fuck, quite tersely: _Galo dies_.

A string beside that, underlined, underlined. _Protect him at all costs. He's the key._

Lio inhales deep through his nose, crunches the sheet of paper in his hands, and puts it up to his forehead. He can’t blame his--future self for wanting to try to figure this all out, the order of things. But what difference does it make, when what they need to be doing is fixing their machine so that Kray doesn’t destroy their chance to establish a stable tunnel?

“Look, we gotta get back to it, boss,” Meis says, very reasonably. “Are you gonna be okay if we let you rest?”

“I’m going downstairs with you. Give me a job.” Lio’s standing, admittedly very woozily, but he’s capable of it.

“No freakin’ way,” says Gueira, pressing Lio’s shoulder. “You were upset as fuck not an hour ago and then you had an ep. Take a break. We’ll handle it.”

Meis tips his chin up, passes his gaze too knowingly over Lio in a way that chafes. “Eat something. You’re hangry for sure.”

“So who’s giving me their lunch, then,” Lio mutters once they’ve gone, when staring into the despairingly empty fridge yields no communal foodstuffs. A Lio cannot live on gatorade, lemons, and honey alone. He glares at the doorway as though shooting daggers at two backs that are no longer there. 

Push, pull, push, pull…

He shoulders his way into his winter coat and heads down the hall toward the pedbridge, where he pauses to take a long breath. He’s been in this building too much recently, barely having gone home, and it’s starting to get repetitive, the glass, the industrial-strength stain-resistant tile, the sight of drifting snow out the windows piling up onto the landscaping outside. The pedbridge is one of those weird spaces between certainties. The past behind him, the future ahead of him. The pedbridge, the now.

Drifting snow.

No. Wait. Hang on.

There’s something here. He was just stopping for a breath, but—there’s something here.

He turns fully to look out the window. Squints out at the snow making its way slowly down. He could be a thousand snowflakes. Like the elder in the hospital waiting-room said. He could be ashes in the updraft, particles curling in an invisible current.

He spends several minutes like that, trying to get his exhausted brain to latch onto the thing he’s looking for. _There’s something here_. But he’s tired, rather than the more desirable wired or inspired, and nothing’s coming. The brain wants, but the body needs.

He heads downstairs. Again. Again.

***

He takes a walk round the block first, hoping that staring into gusting snowfall will help jog his memory. Warmth is preferable, as it turns out. The Rescue is comfortably busy when he walks in, kicks the snow off his boots, and treads through the wet trail on the floor that the lineup has already left behind it. Little ugly bits of slush melt slowly in the streaky pool on the floor, and the wet-floor sign has done nothing to deter people from leaving damp. It’s impossible not to leave some damp if you’ve been outside today.

Behind the counter there is no Galo. Lio sees Aina’s pink hair, the still-virus-infected signage, Varys’s cap, the green crown of Remi’s head way in the back. The person he’d been hoping to see isn’t here.

Aina explains: “He’s cleaning the bathrooms. You can probably grab him if you head to the men’s. Can I get my dear colleague Varys here to make your coffee?”

Varys is built like a mack truck and has never gotten Lio’s order wrong, but Lio’s got no way of knowing how much caffeine he’s consumed today. His heart’s already fidgeting and his brain barely knows where it is at the best of times—he’s everywhere and nowhere at once these days. Better to keep himself anchored than take in more stimulants.

“No, thanks. I’ll take a water. And what kinds of sandwiches do you have?”

Aina plies him with a grilled chicken and roasted vegetable wrap; this he tucks away into his bag. Then to the men’s. It’s done up in black and gold, with a shimmering quartz-effect countertop, a huge gold-bordered mirror, and black-and-white checkerboard tiles. A bit loud, a bit glam, in the best way, and it smells like vanilla room spray and cleaning supplies. There’s the door right behind him, and then a sort of alcove with hand dryers, and then the stalls, urinals, and sinks. As Aina promised him, Galo’s wiping the countertops, singing softly to himself about trails of fire leading him to—someone. He’s got a pretty voice, at least from the three seconds Lio is really able to listen.

“Galo?”

“Doc?” Galo drops what he’s doing, wipes his hands with the cloth, chucks it into a bucket he’s got with him. Then he realizes what he’s been doing and that he’s taking up—most of the bathroom. “Hey, I can book it outta here, give you space to do your business.”

“No—no, it’s cool,” Lio says, shrugging his bag further up onto his shoulder. “No, I came here—to see you.” He can’t say _I needed to check you were alive_ without sounding completely unhinged, but reflecting on it, this still qualifies as bizarre behaviour.

“No worries,” Galo says easily, slowing like he’s allowing Lio to catch up. “What can I—” —he leans on the counter with one hand, puts the other hand on his hip, looking so effortlessly cool, how can he be _cool_ at a _time like this_ , when the world is folding in on itself in wild new ways, when a version of their own planet is dead or dying— “—what can I do for you?”

Lio realizes, sandwich in bag, standing there in the doorway of the bathroom in his winter coat, that whereas the Galo he spoke to most recently was a _more_ informed Galo than he, this one is _less_ informed. He backtracks on himself. “I—”

In that moment he realizes he has no plan, no idea at all of what he ought to say—and so he simply says, “I’m really looking forward to Thursday,” lets it fall out of his mouth.

Galo grins, and it’s like sunrise.

“Hey, awesome news. So you’re one hundred percent coming? Tomorrow?”

“Yeah.” Tomorrow, right, that's tomorrow now. “I mean. It’s kind of wild at work right now. But it’s not like I’ve got plans for the holidays anyway, so I figure I’d better get some partying in somewhere.”

Galo tips his head to one side. “No plans, huh?”

Deep breath. Galo’s not asking it in an accusatory way, the way people sometimes do who don’t know him yet. It sounds like genuine curiosity, not some pre-emptive resentment about his lack of holiday spirit or whatnot. Still. Time to proceed cautiously. “I don’t, uh. I don’t really have a family. Used to, obviously I’m here, but I never had a dad growing up, and my mom passed after a really bad ep.” He swallows, lets his eyes find Galo’s loose, relaxed hands. “It was a long time ago.”

“Fuck, I’m sorry.” At the glittering black countertop Galo stops leaning his cool lean, straightens up, gathers his hands behind his back, shrugs his shoulders up a little. “Makes sense that you’re working so hard to help people who have ‘em, then.”

“Hah, well, obviously it’s for my own benefit too, I’m not a saint.” Lio takes his hands out of his pockets, but he’s not a hand talker, and so just—interlaces his fingers and lets his hands hang. “Anyway, I—” — _had zero plan for how to talk to a very nice normal man in a very nice normal way when the world is gonna eat itself in a minute_ — “—just wanted to say thanks for the invite. It seems like you’re really excited for it. The way you.” He uses his hand to mimic a skier vaulting off a jump. “Hopped the counter to give it to me.”

“It’s kind of our anniversary.” When Lio opens his mouth to protest Galo waves his hands animatedly. “Not the anniversary of our opening, the anniversary of like, all the other Rescuers getting together and saying, we’re gonna do this, we’re going to follow Ignis and quit our shitty chain coffee jobs and start our own place, stop brewing for our shitty bosses and brew for ourselves.” He points at Lio with his index finger. “And do really good custom work for customers, you feel me?”

Frantically Lio thinks to himself: _don’t talk about robots_. But that line of thought is already dragging him with it, so he modulates. “You sound like you’re talking about an auto body shop.”

“Well, it’s not so different, is it?” Galo gestures around him, as though they’re in the kitchen and not in the bathroom. “The product we make literally affects people physically. We have to give people the best coffee at our price point, sourced as responsibly as possible, with the best service we can offer.”

Lio frowns, crosses his arms over his puffy jacket. “Sure, but you’re going to be limited at least a little by your investor since he has such an enormous stake in the shop.”

Galo blinks. Blinks again. “Uh, when did we talk about—”

 _Aw, shit._ Slipping. Lio scrambles: “I just mean, like, my main investor, the one standing up the entire tunneler project, that’s Kray Foresight, same as you. He—mentioned it one day in passing, when he was coming down here. Besides, he owns the whole campus, it’s not a wild assumption to make in any case.”

Galo relaxes like he’s coming to a realization of his own. “Right. Man, he really does have this whole place in his hand.”

“Yeah, like.” Lio lifts his chin. Fuck not using knowledge from the future. He’s already fucked the time stream many times, and he’ll fuck it again. “It’s honestly not safe for everybody if he has all the power.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I guess.” Galo tips his face towards the floor, knotting his eyebrows. Like this he looks small. He’s a head taller than Lio, and most of the time he acts it, but every once in a while he does this thing where he makes himself tiny. Lio is starting to not be able to physically handle it. He can’t _deal_. He can’t physically _deal._ He wishes that Galo would do it while talking about _literally anything other than_ a fucking monster of a billionaire.

“I don’t know, Doc. I just—I can’t help it. He’s kind of my idol. I’ve seen the good work he’s done. His charity stuff. And—” —he gestures at Lio’s chest— “—he supports science and research and stuff. Is it really so bad as long as he’s putting his resources into good projects?”

Lio raises his hands, a peacemaking gesture. “First of all, leaving Kray aside, I think billionaires shouldn’t be billionaires. The fact that they’re allowed to be is—it’s a failure of society. Once you get that much power you don’t think or act like normal people anymore.” He thinks of the way Kray and Biar had been waiting for him in the dark of the lab— “That includes Kray. And besides. You shouldn’t idolize human beings, we’re all some kind of garbage or another. Like, how well do you _really_ know him?”

In that moment something intense happens, Lio’s not too sure what. It starts with Galo looking up at him, holding his gaze hard and searching for a moment like he means to bore through the bathroom door, and ends with Galo going somewhere nearly crestfallen.

The conversation can’t _end_ with Galo’s face looking like that. Fuck—Lio backtracks and shifts forward at the same time, leaving the door well behind— “Anyway, men’s bathroom, probably not the best place to break down someone you kind of hero-worship? I just—Thursday. Tomorrow. It sounds like it’s going to be quite something.”

A smile rises in Galo again. Cooling seafoam. “Hell yeah. I don’t think too many other people’ll show up, everyone’s got holiday and end-of-year stuff going on, so like… any requests?” 

“Uh, requests for what?”

“For coffee creations,” Galo says, positively conspiratorial.

“I mean, my tastes are super basic, so I’m not the guy to ask,” Lio says. “I don’t really do sweet. I like the way coffee hits you in the face.”

Galo laughs out his nose, wrinkles it a little. How dare he? Really—how dare he??

“Doc, you drink lattes,” he says. It is a veritable taunt.

“I like the bitterness of coffee,” Lio counters, and advances on Galo, something tinily defensive crawling up the back of his neck. “I also like the taste of warm milk.”

Galo’s eyes are—quite criminally, Lio thinks—glittering with mischief. “Warm _soy_ milk.”

“Yeah, I’m lactose intolerant.” Doctor’s note and everything!

With razor-sharp pity in his eyes Galo steps forward and grasps Lio by the elbows. “Doc,” he says, very slowly, “the soy milk we use has sugar added.”

Lio blinks. “What?” Accusingly: “The hell?” Bullishly: “No it doesn’t.”

A squeeze at his elbows. “Doc, you gotta admit it to yourself. You like your coffee sweet.”

“I do _not_ ,” Lio hisses, and shakes off Galo’s hands to the sound of snickering.

“No shame in it! A lot of coffee cultures add sugar to their coffee! You don’t have to be macho about it!”

“I am not _macho_ ,” says Lio, “about my _coffee choices_. I _genuinely enjoy a bitter coffee_.”

“Okay, then,” Galo fires back, grinning brighter and hotter than ever. The edge of a red-hot blade. “Prove it. I’ll put together a coffee tasting for you tomorrow night. You’ll get to try shots of every bean I’ve got. Get that bitterness. And maybe broaden your palate while you’re at it. How bout it?”

“Sounds like a recipe for a prodigious caffeine high.”

“I’ll give you half-measures, just enough to taste, and plenty to eat to weigh it down.” Galo’s practically vibrating with energy, and like this, oh fuck, Lio can see it, fuck, he can see it, he can see Thursday night taking shape.

Lio feels the bottom drop out of him completely. Oh no. No. Oh _noooo_. Whole-body he’s struck with the urge to do bad things to this beautiful man and he _cannot_ , the world is falling apart, he _cannot_ —

“Let me make you something new right now,” Galo says, an entreaty. “Have you ever tried a noisette? Shot of espresso, dab of steamed milk?” He reaches to grab one of Lio’s hands, and their fingers touch, and—

The hand dryer turns on. 

Lio’s instinct grabs him as Galo pulls his hand back. “Shh,” Lio tells the dryer. Galo snickers. When Lio looks up at him he sees genuine amusement, and that lightens the weight on Lio’s chest and shoulders.

Deep breath. “Okay, Galo Thymos,” Lio says, and lifts his chin. A challenge. “Make me a noisette.”

Something not amusement flashes through Galo then: there’s a quick flutter of eyelashes, a brief inhale, a level of play in his pupils. “You got it, Doc,” he says, and with a stumbling grin abandons his cleaning supplies to head for the door. Backs toward it, eyes never leaving Lio for a second. “Right away.”

Lio genuinely has to pee, and so he does. Out of respect he waits until soap and hot water are pouring over his hands— _his_ hands, his own hands, intact, intact—to be grateful for Galo being one hundred percent alive.

To be grateful that they still, apparently, have some time.

***

The noisette is fucking awesome. Take _that,_ Galo Thymos. And also: thank you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **death mention, canon-typical torture/human exploitation mention, canon-typical dismemberment mention** : this all happens in the scene that starts "But it doesn’t happen right. Something’s not right." unfortunately it's a key scene. lmk if you needed to skip it and I'll provide a summary
> 
>  **food mention** : to avoid this, steer clear of the paragraphs that begin with "Varys is built like a mack truck" and pick back up with "Then to the men's." they also talk at length about coffee, which I'm not sure whether I can (1) tell you to avoid that without telling you to avoid half the chapter and (2) it's... a coffee shop AU, there will be coffee discussed


End file.
